by Rachel Heng
The elevator pinged open at the twelfth floor.
“Here we are,” Kaito chirped. He was being unnaturally cheerful. Lea knew he was doing it for her. She was transparent to him, so she knew he could sense the heaviness she felt. But the converse was also true, and his attempts to buoy her up were painfully obvious to her as well.
Dwight was in Room 1212. Lea counted down the numbers as they walked down the busy hallway, nurses with tabs and visitors with beverages in foam cups lining the walls. Kaito and Lea looked like anyone else, a father and daughter, flowers in hand. There to visit family or perhaps a close friend. There was nothing to mark Lea out as the perpetrator, the reason for the visit itself. Nothing telling the world that it was the very fist that grasped the wet stems of white lilies which had also slammed into Dwight’s white face, no telling anyone that her dainty prepubescent feet shod in spotless sneakers were the same feet that were still driving into Dwight’s ribs even as they dragged her off him. There was nothing to say that Dwight was innocent, that he was harmless, a mere unfortunate passerby.
1202, 1204, 1206, 1208, 1210. And then they were there. They stopped outside Dwight’s room.
Kaito crouched down so he and Lea were at eye level. “We can still go home,” he said. “Leave the flowers with a nurse. You don’t have to go in if you don’t want to.”
Did he know? Did he have a premonition, a sense of foreboding, did he read it in Lea’s face? Lea shook her head, but she didn’t trust herself to speak. The lights in the hallway hurt her eyes when she looked up at her father. His familiar face, soft with concern, filled her with loneliness. She did not have the words to tell him about the feeling Dwight induced in her, about the violence that bubbled up unbidden, the pleasure and relief of giving in to it, the shame after. Antisanct.
She opened the door with resolve. She would go in, look Dwight in the eye, apologize, leave the flowers next to the bed.
But there would be no looking Dwight in the eye, for his face was wrapped in gauze. A large plastic tube protruded from his mouth, two smaller ones from his nose. His chest was bare, bandaged in some places, tiny wires stuck to bare skin in others. His arms were the worst, bone thin and speckled with bruises. Lea counted seven different IVs on each arm, hooked up to separate hanging bags of colorless fluid arranged around his bed.
“Jesus Christ,” Kaito muttered.
He’ll need replacements at the age of eleven. They say he might be brain dead.
Kaito pinched the base of his nose, squeezing his eyes shut. He looked like he was counting to ten. When he opened his eyes again, they were dry, but filled with resolve.
“What’s the point?” he said in a low voice. “Are they going to keep him on a machine forever?”
He was still talking to himself when Lea went up to the bed and placed her hand on Dwight’s arm. His skin was cold and faintly moist to touch, the purple bruises blooming across its pale expanse. Those bruises had not been caused by her, she realized. They were dotted with scabs. She lifted her gaze to the various IVs protruding from his arm, the ventilator protruding from his mouth, keeping him alive.
“Replace every part of his body? Replace his brain?” Kaito was still muttering behind her, his hand over his face.
He had said the same thing when Samuel was in hospital. Samuel had hated the cold white room filled with machines and only plastic chairs to sit on. In his brief windows of lucidity, he’d asked Lea where he was, told her he wanted to go home. She remembered Kaito tentatively suggesting that they should indeed bring him home. But Uju had insisted on keeping him in the hospital, where doctors were on call around the clock in case anything happened. The boy is dying. What else could happen? Kaito had asked. But he had given in; Samuel stayed in the hospital. Lea wondered if he regretted it now.
Suddenly it became clear to her what had to be done.
Lea began pulling the needles out of Dwight’s arm, gently but firmly. She placed them in a neat pile by his side, then leaned across and began doing the other arm. Kaito was still muttering to himself with his hands over his face, and didn’t seem to notice what she was doing.
The ventilator would be more difficult, she gathered. She could pull it out, but she knew from when Samuel slipped into his coma, when they finally took it out, that it was deeply wedged in his throat and required a doctor’s expertise to remove. She did not want to hurt Dwight.
No, she did not want to hurt him now. The flame inside her was gone, the violence she feared replaced by a sense of peace. She was saving Dwight. She had hurt him, yes, but what the doctors and the family and the world could not see was that they were hurting him more now. Dwight was no longer there.
Her gaze followed the plastic tube from Dwight’s pale lips to the machine it was connected to. The machine, in turn, had a long gray cord leading from it to the power socket in the wall. When she removed the plug from the socket, all she was thinking of was Samuel. Samuel didn’t get a chance to lie in his own bed one last time, didn’t get a chance to feel the curtain-fluttering breeze from his window, to hear the noise of cars and conversations floating up from the street below, to see the faces of his family around him in his home. Dwight wouldn’t either, she thought, but at least he wouldn’t have to suffer for another six months in this cruel white room.
But to Lea’s dismay, the low rumble of the machine kept going even after she disconnected it, incessant and unforgiving. Even worse, a loud beeping noise began, emitted from somewhere in the room. She stood up and backed away from Dwight.
“What did you do, Lea?” Kaito said, his voice quick and urgent. He stepped toward the bed, taking in the piles of bloodied needles removed from Dwight’s arm, staining the white sheets. “Oh Jesus,” he said. “Oh, Lea.”
He looked down and saw the disconnected plug. Lea heard his sharp intake of breath. Time seemed to slow down as Kaito bent to pick up the plug, but it was not enough. It did not slow down enough to stop altogether, to keep her in the time before everything changed forever.
The doctors burst in through the door.
TWENTY-ONE
They were in Branko’s car, on their way to the ferry terminal after their shifts had ended, when Anja grabbed Branko’s hand. She couldn’t go home to her mother that night. The image of Dominique’s face had haunted her all week. Dominique, peering out from the photo frames in the bedroom. Dominique, lying in the glass box. Dominique, reduced to mist and air.
Anja had never met her. Dominique had been leading the Club when Anja joined, but by then, she had already been lying low. She’d thought that if she distanced herself from the Club, they wouldn’t follow through on their threat to force experimental Third Wave treatments upon her. But the Ministry was persistent. Anja’s main source of direction came from Mrs. Jackman, who, at a hundred and seventy, was unafraid of anything the Ministry could threaten. But even so.
She’d known Dominique remotely, mainly through secondhand accounts. After Anja had the idea for the first video, after she executed the second, she’d received bottles of expensive Argentinian wine in the mail, with long handwritten notes from Dominique thanking her for her work. The handwriting had been looping and girly, old-fashioned, that of a bygone era when children were trained to write cursive in schools. She’d signed off with a large D, followed by “XOXO,” as if they were teenage pen pals and not antisanct activists running a criminal organization. Anja had always wondered what Dominique was like in person. She’d always assumed she would meet her one day, but now she never would.
She felt the tendons in the back of Branko’s hand stiffen at her touch, sensed him glancing at her surreptitiously while still pretending to look at the road. She ran her fingers up his forearm. It was warm and solid, comforting. She slid her hand around his bicep, to feel the inside of his upper arm, where the skin was smooth and soft as a baby’s. She squeezed gently, felt him flex imperceptibly under her touch, smiled at the vanity that this betrayed.
Branko didn’t speak. She could hear his breat
hing grow slow and shallow. He didn’t move, either, except to gently steer the car to the side of the road. When they had come to a stop, he folded his hands in his lap and looked at her.
His lips were rough and chapped when she brought her mouth to his, but when he parted them his tongue was warm. He let himself be kissed, shyly. Anja was struck by the thought that Branko was at least thirty years younger than her, despite his thinning hair and crinkled skin. There was no bravado in the way he brought his hand to rest gently on her knee, the way he kept his tongue behind his teeth as she probed his mouth. There was something chaste in it, something hesitant.
She wasn’t the only one who hadn’t touched another person’s skin in years, Anja realized. The thought made her soften inside, made her warm toward loud, crude Branko, who made braying jokes in the diner but secretly pined for his long-gone brother, who spent his days and nights working to support the niece he had left behind.
* * *
Branko’s apartment was not much larger than hers, but the air inside was fresh and cool, and she could tell that in the day, it would be a bright, airy space. She imagined waking up on the rumpled futon by the window, a breeze caressing her bare skin, the room lit up by the early-morning silence. She would stay the night, Anja decided.
The thought made her turn to the man standing next to her, turning his keys in his palm. The crunching metallic noise stopped when she placed her hand on the small of his back. As the soft slugs of their tongues curled around each other, she wondered what it would be like to run away with a man, leave the small, cramped apartment, the diner job, the Club. Give her mother’s body up to one of the farms. She would live with someone in an apartment like this, one where the living room was separate from the bedroom, one with its own modest toilet and shower. She would give violin lessons to neighborhood brats, spoiled in the way that only kids from slightly deprived families were, where guilty parents overcompensated by giving in to their every request.
Branko pulled away from her. He rested his thumbs in the hollows of her collarbone.
“What are you thinking?” he asked.
It was dark enough that Anja couldn’t see his face, but still she could feel his gaze on her.
“How do you ever know—” She paused.
“Know what?”
“How do you ever know—anything? How to do the right thing?”
Branko was silent. His hands were warm and heavy on her shoulders. She felt the sturdy solidity of him, the opaqueness of his skin, the stale heat of his breath. She felt him as a weight, anchoring her, binding her to the earth.
“Never mind,” she said hastily. “I was just thinking out loud.” She pulled him toward her again, pressing her thighs against his, resting one foot gently on his toes, claiming him for her own.
He led her over to the futon, lifting and swinging her to the ground as if she weighed nothing. Then he knelt over her in the dark, stroking her hair, thumbing her cheek. She waited for him to climb on top of her, to press his mouth against hers again. But instead, he lay down next to her, pulling a thin sheet over their bodies. They lay side by side in the dark, staring up at the ceiling in silence for a long while. His breathing was deep and steady. She relished the sound of it, the sound of those long, robust breaths traveling in and out of his lungs, no wheezing, no rattling, no uneven starting and stopping. She thought he was asleep until he spoke again.
“I think,” he said slowly, kindly, “whatever you decide to do, your mother would understand.”
Then he turned and gently kissed her clothed shoulder.
“Good night, Anja,” he said into her skin.
“Good night,” she answered, closing her eyes.
TWENTY-TWO
In the weeks that followed, Lea didn’t hear from her father, nor did she try to contact him. Now that Todd was gone from her apartment, she lived a solitary life. After the initial rage and confusion she’d felt at the party, all the feeling seemed to have been drained out of her body. It was a problem so large, so impossibly sad, that she found herself doing what she’d learned to do when her father had left the first time. She would not think about it. She would ignore it, pretend it wasn’t there. It was as if she’d flicked a switch in her heart. She blocked out all thoughts to do with her father, or the Club, or Anja, and threw herself into her work, going into the office before sunrise and staying till the MaxWork alarms sounded in the evenings.
One morning she came to work even earlier than usual. At that time of the morning, the lobby was a vacant set, vast and empty, robotic floor cleaners whirring in smooth circles. Through the glass walls, the sky was a weak, ashy gray. There was no rain yet, only a violent wind that squealed and moaned across the windows and walls.
Upstairs, the lights flickered on when she tapped her security code into the panel at the door. Lea stood still, listening to the silence. She remembered the early years of her job, when Jiang had first hired her as a junior analyst. Those long days and nights of reading reports, building programs, writing recommendations. She didn’t have any clients of her own then, nor a private office. She sat in the middle of the floor with the other analysts, their four desks arranged together making one large island. Hired around the same time, all of them were meek and eager to please, in awe of their sleek surroundings, of the serious women and men behind closed glass doors, with the city at their feet.
Lea was the only one left of those four analysts. That was how they did it at LTCP—Up or out, as Jiang liked to pronounce, as if it weren’t just another corporate cliché and he had come up with the phrase himself. It wasn’t an easy life, not at the beginning at least, back when cortisol-generation indices were still regarded with suspicion and disdain, when dark circles and frown lines were still unofficially a badge of honor, a sign of ambition. Those were the days before the MaxWork Directives and the mind-set shift that came years after the Second Wave, when the Healthfin industry still ran on the same heady fuel as the rest of the alternative finance world. Lea had done the all-nighters, the day-long flights to and from Asia, the chain-drinking of coffees and energy drinks. She’d spent hours laboring over logos and color-coding for presentations to clients, run painstaking simulations in the clunky, glitching spreadsheets that pre-dated the intelligent programs they had today.
She remembered the time she’d left at four in the morning for a third day in a row, her mind simultaneously buzzing with numbers and foggy with sleep, only to receive a call from one of the partners just as the taxi reached her apartment. She remembered the numb resignation of taking a shower and changing into a fresh suit, heading straight to the airport with a stack of presentations once she was done.
There were no analysts in sight now. Working any staff member that hard today was deeply counter to the new order of things, the culture of careful preservation and upbeat life-loving behavior that ran through every successful company’s veins.
Things were much better today, by any measure.
Still. There was something to be said for it, the way things used to be. Lea remembered the thrill of a model coming together on screen in the still of the night, after everyone had gone home except for her and the other analysts. She remembered the easy silence that flowed among them, the pattering of fingers across keyboards as soothing as the sound of rain. She remembered the coffee runs and the Nutripak orders, the gossip they’d exchange while sipping from their cartons.
Lea crossed the office floor silently, heading not for her room but for the analysts’. There were three of them these days, fresh from their postdoc programs. They sat in an office together, but as far as Lea could tell there was no camaraderie among them. They were odd, tense things, exuding the unique mix of confidence and the fear of failure that only thirty-five years of elite schooling could breed.
Their room was empty now. Lea sat down at one of the research terminals and logged in.
What was she looking for? She didn’t know, but now she knew why she was here. It was something Dominique’s mother had
said at the party: Her number placed her first in line for the new experimental phase of mandatory extension treatments, the ones which the “life-loving” fight to receive. The Third Wave, they call it.
It was something that had niggled at the back of Lea’s mind in the past few weeks, a question beneath all the other questions. She would tackle this first.
The interface had changed, but the keyboard shortcuts were still the same. Slowly, her fingers found their old reassuring rhythm. Lea examined reams of market data and metrics for every day of the last year, alert for any anomalies or spikes. It was an immersive, hypnotic business. She worked quickly and silently, the satisfying rush of productivity sending her spine straight and her feet tapping.
An hour passed, and then two. Lea stood up abruptly. There was nothing. Nothing irregular at all, nothing that suggested even a hint of the Third Wave.
Lea was still standing at the window, staring out at the dappled gray sky, when she heard Jiang’s voice out in the lobby. She turned to look. The top of his balding head was just visible above the partition wall that separated the receptionist’s desk from the rest of the office. Lea couldn’t hear what he was saying. But something about the tone of his voice made her crack open the door of the analysts’ room, and then, without knowing why, slip behind a file cabinet where Jiang couldn’t see her.
“… But it’s hard to say for sure. It all depends on the actual resource efficiency projections, and those haven’t been released yet,” Jiang was saying. Was he on the phone?
“Well, yes. But my husband…” A second voice faded into a murmur.
