The Bridge

by J. S. Breukelaar

  I heard a snuffling under the bed, that cheap-carpet drag, and slowly lifted the sheet, my breath coming quick. I was maybe expecting the spotlit eyes of a lost flying fox, like once back in the Blood Temple—dragging itself by its broken wings, it had looked more insect than mammal—but there was nothing. Each night since arriving in Upper Slant, I’d had the same dream, or different versions of it. Kai and me playing on the lichen-striped outcrop even though I am already too old for games and Kai is already dead. She taunts me through lips black with rot, teeth hanging by ropy gums in her still beautiful face. In my dream the shadow when it first appears is both distant and too close, a shadow without a shadow, erect as a monument, the ravens circling overhead with their iridescent wings and their sad-baby cries, Kai rank and rotting beneath a sky too high and never high enough. “He’ll always find us,” she gurgles. “We’ll never be free.”

  In my dreams it was Kai the guilty survivor instead of me.

  CHAPTER 2

  HORNS

  “Native hair,” they call me at the Blood Temple, and occasionally “pube-head.” Sometimes a Made punches me in the stomach to watch me gasp for breath or throw up. The Assistants summon me to the laboratory and make me take off my clothes, walk around me scratching their chins. No one sees me lurk weeping at the edge of the playground where a little girl waits behind the bins, a girl I never see in the bunkroom or in class. She is lank-haired and red-eyed. I watch her lick her lips like I am what she’s waiting for. She has a snake around her neck and another around her waist and holds a bunch of them in her hands like a bouquet (or a cat-o’-nine-tails) and she smiles as one by one, she bites their heads off—blood running down her chin. Chew, swallow, repeat.

  She speaks to me, this headless snake girl, and I am lonely enough to listen. Of course it’s not a hiss. That would be something that someone with no imagination would come up with. By now I am tortured by the guilty secret that my brain does not work within the same constraints as the other Mades. I have imagination to spare. The headless snake girl smiles a pointed-toothed smile at me and she says in a baby-raven voice,

  “Truth or dead.”

  “You mean, truth or dare?” I say.

  “Suit yourself.” When she shrugs, the snakes sway around her head like headless, sexless dancers.

  “Are you Tiff?”

  At that she howls in furious mirth, and her red eyes narrow to slits and she puts a finger across her lips and it is the wrong size for her, this finger, swollen and pale and stiff, and she holds it across her lips long enough for me to pee my pants, and then she is gone.

  I look around to make sure no one sees the pee running down my legs, and across the playground, Kai is staring back. Narn has not yet told us that we are real sisters. And that it is she, as much as the Father, who made us.

  The Father and his business partner in Silicon Alley once shared two huge chunks of South Rim, enough Paradise in any man’s language. There are many barracks in the Blood Temple, spread across land the Father owns in the Rim, depending on if they are for Littles, Middles, Bigs, or Males. The Rogues Bay property where I am made, is the biggest. It is thousands of acres in a shallow plain ringed by a mountainous ridge to the south and to the north, the black straits of the bay. There is a weapons testing facility somewhere to the west. Paddocks stretch all around littered with drought-starved sheep carcasses and rabbit droppings, and where feral dogs howl and yap and will drag a stray Made off and eat her alive. The Father’s ravens are there to protect us, to ensure we don’t stray. There are caves nearby painted with long-legged people the color of pus and short-legged animals the color of blood, the floors littered with petrified thylacine bones. Except for scheduled school excursions, the caves are out of bounds. The ravens keep it that way. Beyond the caves is a field where slate stones lie scattered among the kangaroo grass and sheep droppings. We have heard that surrogates are buried there when the Father’s incinerators fail. Even the Blood Temple has its myths.

  There is a town too, and a school, and there is a community of First People on the other side of the wide lagoon—they are elongated shimmers along the shore. The noise from their pub carries across the water, the crack of footballs and the smell of their cooking fires. Their songs populate my dreams and I wake up with them on the tip of my tongue. But the Father owns it all now after his business partner was found murdered , and the First People keep well away.

  On dreaded assembly mornings, the Father’s Blundstone boots echo down the hallway. Silence follows in the wake of his footsteps. The silence, like the noise of his passing, is multiple—he has many Assistants. Most of them are scientists. He also has a robotic surgeon who implants the source code into our brains in vitro, but we have never seen it. All we know is that it came from the weapons testing facility outside of the property. In return for the robot, the Father sometimes lets the officers from the facility take his Mades for what he calls a “test run.”

  Silence is not the only thing that marches in the wake of the Father. Mades follow in neat, silent lines toward the asphalt play area. The ravens croak at our approach, flap their rose-tinged wings, so we know they are watching. Mades from all the other Middles Bunks assemble too. The school was abandoned years before the Father found it—Matron says that the townspeople fled after contamination from the weapons testing facility. Itinerants and meth-cookers and possums and families of brown snakes took over, until finally something even more lethal came along.

  The Father.

  The Littles are on another part of the property. The high school and the Bigs and the Malemades, are somewhere else entirely.

  Matron stands to one side of the Father before the whitewashed brick wall, and on the other side, the head Assistant rocks on his heels. Matron lifts up a jar in which floats a shriveled pink thing with two long curly ears. She announces importantly that it’s a lady-bit.

  “You all have them,” the Father says, making a triangle with his hands near his crotch. He wears jeans and a battered Akubra over long braids. We know that he is very rich. Remnants of a silky Upper Slant accent cling to his tongue.

  Kai stands too close to me. I don’t yet know that we are twins, for all that I feel a connection to her that shames me—I salivate in her presence, think I might faint. I am obsessed. I feel her flinch when the Matron holds the glass jar up high. Unlike me, Kai is beautiful with long black hair that ripples like the heat aura of a bush fire. Tall and fierce, she is no more my champion than she is any of the other ugly runts, but I take it nonetheless. Even better though, is when she ignores me to the point of marking me out for a special kind of indifference—I feel that she has already given me my life simply by being someone to love more than myself.

  “What if Matron,” we both whisper at the same time, “drops the jar?”

  She turns to me with a joker grin. Her mouth is too big and her teeth are too small.

  My heart is in my mouth. Matron jiggles the jar with the lady-bit floating in it. It bumps against the glass like a fish in a tank. Like it wants to get out.

  “That there womb,” the Father is saying in his funny accent, his r’s gone all squishy, “is a bad ’un. Cut it from a faulty Made after her unmaking. All the bad cooches”—the Father uses that word to describe us, and other words beginning with c—“are removed for scientific study.”

  We know this. Unmaking is either chemical or surgical—what the Father calls the “Final Cut.”

  “Science never sleeps,” the Father continues, taking the jar from Matron and letting it fake-slip. We gasp and the Father laughs at his own joke, just like a real dad.

  “Had you there,” he says.

  No one answers and we begin to fidget. We want to hear more about the lady-bits. The Assistant rocks impatiently on his heels and clears his throat. The Father raps the glass with a long manly finger. Tappa-tap-tap. The pink thing in the murky liquid jumps and its ears wiggle sluggishly. “W
hat does this here bad lady-bit look like to you, Mades?”

  “An elephant!” yells out a Made. “A rabbit!” says another. “With wormy ears!” We are all warming to the task.

  “A raven,” Kai abruptly brays. “With its feathers plucked.”

  I am mortified. Not for her too-loud cracked voice but for my own gutless silence. Of course, I also saw a plucked blackbird (baked in a pie), but was too scared to say it, to even think it. If I live to be a hundred, I will never be half the Made she is. That only makes me love her twice as much.

  Up until recently, Kai has been the Father’s pet. Kai is a boardgame queen. Five-card draw, Scrabble, backgammon, Word Whomp, checkers—and the Father loves nothing better than to summon her to his rooftop quarters after she returns from picking up his pharmaceuticals from the witch. They play for stakes mostly. Smartees sometimes. Sugar packets maybe, or teabags, both of which Matron must confiscate later because Mades are not allowed caffeine. And the sugar packets attract ants.

  “I opened with a two and a one, split my back runners—risked the blot but I had a total of twenty-eight ways to cover it and make the five point,” she’d bragged one evening, her mouth smeared with chocolate. “So I did. The Father didn’t know what hit him.”

  Maybe not at first. And by the time he does, it is too late.

  And now after Kai’s outburst, the assembly has gone uncomfortably silent. Mades have no self-control—that is the reason for the Forever Code, but it works better in some of us than in others and is in occasional need of adjustment. Matron jots a note in her book, not a good sign. We lower our eyes to the ground and our shoulders slump. We get anxious when one of us is in trouble, especially someone as beloved as Kai.

  “Think before you speak, Made.” The Father holds the jar in one hand and points to the thing inside it. “Those twisted appendages are not wings, but clearly, horns. Like on a goat. Matron, why don’t you tell us what they are?”

  “Fallopian tubes, Father.”

  We shift on the asphalt. The cicadas have gone silent.

  The Assistant beams at us. “Why do they look like goat horns, Mades?”

  Maybe because no one answers, or maybe because she can’t help herself, Matron primps and says, “Because the goat is Satan’s Beast, of course.”

  “Satan’s Beast,” we intone with relief. Our memories tell us it’s a phrase we know, but our memories have more holes in them than Cook’s breakfast damper.

  “Bingo,” the Father says. “The mark of the beast, horns and all, inside each and every one of you. Until I came along and saved you. Thanks to me, this is what you have now.” He turns to the Assistant, who holds up the other jar. The liquid is less cloudy, less the color of piss, and the lady-bit inside it has no horns or wings, but instead what looks like small amputated little ears at the side of the heart-shaped “head.” If the bad lady-bit looks kind of like a goat, the good one looks a lot like a man.

  “Women are an accident of nature,” our founder continues, “and therefore, unnatural as hell. If men are made in the image of God, women are what ended up on the cutting-room floor. Scrap, waste for the devil’s dustbin—” The Father falters for a moment, but the Assistant beams encouragingly at the Father’s overreaching metaphor.

  “—from which he pulled you out, being the scavenger beast that he is,” he continues in his slippery-slidey accent. “Took a big old bite out of you and tossed you back on the junk heap of history. Where you’ve stayed. And stunk. And foulness has bred inside you and out.”

  Kai and I avoid each other eyes.

  “For centuries men were confounded by the impossibility of removing the mark of the beast from women,” the Father says, “The mark that kept us men, by association with it, out of Paradise.”

  Mades have short lifespans. The oldest are not yet two decades old and Matron says even with improved protocols, our generation’ll be lucky to make it to fifty.

  I think even then I knew Kai would be taken from me.

  A murder of ravens bursts from the tin roof, bleating out their sad-baby cries. I am hungry for breakfast, but I am always hungry. I think of Tiff munching on her snakes and my mouth waters.

  Finally the Assistant steps in. “Through our, um, combined efforts—known as ART—which stands for?”

  “Augmented Reproductive Technology,” we answer as one.

  “You have been remade according to another kind of image,” he says. “Without those pesky fallopian tubes, you have at least a passing chance of a new Paradise right here in Rogues Bay, through which you may re-enter at the Father’s will. It’s a tricky thing known as restriction protocol that none of you will ever understand, but basically it means no more horns as it were. You’re free at last.”

  “Free my ass,” mutters Kai, and I feel a cold finger at the base of my spine

  But the Father isn’t finished. “No longer do you carry the mark of the Beast. No longer can he draw you into sin in his name. Amen to ART,” the Father says.

  “Amen,” we intone.

  The Father’s genius with ART is the reason we are here.

  The blind pink womb bobs around like a puppet. The Father aims a playful finger-gun at the assembled Mades and says: “Bottom line, thanks to my carefully assembled experts”—he nods curtly to the Assistant—“and at significant expense, you are now remade at the level of blood and circuitry to be sterile.”

  The Assistant fake-claps his pale grabby hands.

  “One day, of course, that will change, and you’ll be able to reproduce, to couple, such as it is, with my source code—”

  “Until which, it is safe behind a firewall so thick not even the Devil himself can butt his way through.” The Assistant laughs and smooths his mustache and Matron smiles uneasily at the nerve of the interruption.

  “Meantime,” the Father says. “Not a cooch among you that can bleed, breed or carry a human seed.”

  Bleed, breed, seed.

  By now all up and down the line, Mades have their hands to their bellies, praying that their bits look like a deaf god rather than a horny beast.

  The assembly is almost over. My stomach is growling with hunger. The Father spreads his arms out wide, palms up, as if taking ownership of the sky itself. “The Devil lurks beneath the bridge, Mades. Under the arches he waits—not for the saved but for the fallen, those who linger in the crossing. These he will undress with his eyes from which there is no possibility of self-defense—mark me—and his diseased nostrils will quiver at the smell of their unhealed wound and his clawed hand will snatch at them and they will not weep like you, or fear him as you do. They will laugh, and spread their legs to the Darkness, and beg for its seed, only to be torn asunder by their own monstrous hungry issue. I saved you from this. Without me you are lost. Fear not, because I will always be with you.”

  And also with you.

  This is what passes for sex ed. in the Blood Temple.

  * * *

  The windows of the Tower were double glazed, the sensory deprivation of the dormitory interrupted only by elevator tings, the occasional shuffle of feet past the door. The minutes ticked by. I found myself missing Rogues Bay, just a little. Especially Middles Bunk where the call of the bats, the yap of feral dogs looking for ghost sheep and the smell of the night guard’s cigarettes leaked through the high, rattling windows and into our dreams. Here the only smell was my roommate Trudy’s lotion, and music leaking from Lara’s earbuds where she’d left her phone behind, the only sound. They were survivors too—raised in the Blood Temple—yet it was as if they were doing everything they could to forget, when all I wanted was to try to remember.

  Because I hated the Father and I loved him. I couldn’t help it. He made me love him. Even after what he did to Kai. He impregnated all of us with love, with submission. He wiped our memories. His were enough, he said. His code cured us of imagination, a monstrous appenda
ge and prone to corruption. Reality was enough, he said.

  “I have healed your wound, Mades,” the Father had said. “You’re welcome.”

  After my escape to the Starvelings, Narn tried to rebuild my faulty memory as best as she could. She had a pile of tattered Golden Books and told me to read them. All of them. She babbled at me in that discordant pidgin of hers, which I could barely follow, but somehow absorbed after the fact, the taste of her words on my tongue, the feel of them in my heart.

  I knew she didn’t love me. I knew she did it for Kai.

  Slowly, through Narn’s spells and charms and silly songs sung in her perfect pitch, clicks and glottal and crimson tears, and also through her libations and bitter teas, oblivion gave way to patchy recall. My memory was never as good as Kai’s, and Narn and I fought bitterly over my slow progress. It was only later, much later, that she would begrudgingly acknowledge that Kai’s one weakness—an imagination irreparably damaged by the Father’s code—was my own monstrous strength.

  It was the nicest thing she ever said to me.

  The low, opaque sky wrapped around the window like a dirty bandage. The Father made us for a different climate, a different sky. High up in this Tower, worlds away from everything I knew, Redress had all the treacherous finality of déjà vu. Redress? At nineteen, and getting sicker by the day, I knew well enough not to trust such a word. I had welcomed the chance to leave the Starvelings, be free of Narn’s disappointment in me, but balked at the last minute. Who would collect the rare golden-eye, telochistes chrysophtlamus, that had just begun to bloom across Kai’s gravestone? Who would get drunk with the thylacine—my leaving would kill him, I protested. And even Narn had seemed to have second thoughts. But we both knew that I had to go. The truth had already begun to eat us alive.