Seven Wonders of a Once and Future World

by Caroline M. Yoachim

  You didn’t come to my disembodiment party to get your piece of me. You cling to your body even as it fails you, dragging you inevitably closer to a final and unending death. I mailed my eyes to you in a package filled with single-serving bags of those potato chips you like to eat, which are better padding than Styrofoam peanuts. I worried that you would throw my eyes away, and the last thing I’d see would be maggots burrowing into my pupils—but instead you strung them like beads on a section of fishing line, and wore them as a necklace.

  With eyes no longer mine, I see a forest of rowan and maple, overgrown with moss that weeps with rain. I used to find such things beautiful, but I do not miss this world we shared. I certainly do not miss my body, with its parts scattered around the world. There are some who argue that I no longer feel emotion, but moths eat holes in the fabric of my disembodied consciousness. The goldfish of my past swims in restless circles as it drowns in a bowl of whiskey. I miss you.

  If you change your mind before you die, invite me to your disembodiment party. I will take anything—an eyelash or a kidney, your left ear or sixteen neurons from the cortex of your brain. It will be all the body that I have.

  EVERYONE’S A CLOWN

  When Amelia turned six, I took her to the circus. She’d been a little withdrawn lately, and I wanted to cheer her up. She watched with a grim expression as elephants marched around the ring. “What’s the matter?”

  “The elephants look unhappy.”

  I couldn’t see anything wrong with the elephants, and the spotlight shifted to a trio of clowns. “Look at the clowns, Meelie, see the big red smiles?”

  “You can see their faces? Do you like them?”

  “Sure,” I said, baffled by her odd response. I stared at the clowns. Amelia mumbled something and touched my arm to get my attention. Her face was painted like a clown—a bright red mouth and paper-white skin, black triangles above and below her eyes.

  The woman in the next seat had clown make-up too, and a bright red wig. I scanned the audience. Every single seat was occupied by a clown. Sad clowns, happy clowns, scary clowns, nothing but clowns as far as I could see in the dim light. It had to be a trick, part of the act.

  The show continued, and every performer was a clown. Amelia spent more time looking at me than at the stage. I tried to pretend that nothing was wrong so she wouldn’t worry.

  “Not long after the circus, my daughter turned into a sad clown, with a blue teardrop beneath her left eye,” I told the neurologist. Dr. Williams was a silly clown, with a big red nose and high-arched eyebrows. Her rainbow hair framed her face in tight ringlets. I wondered what she looked like to other people.

  “I’m amazed you can recognize people,” she said.

  “Everyone’s a clown, but they aren’t all the same clown.”

  She studied my MRI results. “There’s nothing physically wrong with your fusiform gyrus, or anywhere else on the scan.”

  “What else can we try?” I asked. I needed to stop seeing clowns. I worried that my break with reality was what made my daughter so sad. We never should have gone to the circus.

  “Maybe a psychiatrist?” Dr. Williams suggested. She gave me a referral.

  “Midnight was sick all over the carpet,” Amelia reported when I got back from my appointment. She had two tears under her left eye. That was a bad sign. People’s clown faces didn’t change for passing moods.

  “I’ll clean it up.” Midnight’s favorite cat pastimes were eating grass and puking on the carpet. I sprinkled a box of baking soda over the befouled area. “Is everything okay at school?”

  Amelia nodded.

  “Are you worried about something?” I asked. Amelia struggled with putting her feelings into words, as kids often do. Hell, grownups too. But I had to figure out why her clown face was so sad.

  “Do you know what your face looks like?” she asked.

  My heart sank. It was me, then. I’d been avoiding mirrors, but I didn’t want Amelia to worry. In the most cheerful voice I could muster, I said, “Let’s go look together at the mirror.”

  That was a mistake.

  My too-big mouth was filled with pointy teeth and my eyes were bloodshot red with black pupils. I searched the face in the mirror for any feature that I recognized, any sign of what I’d looked like before my brain started distorting faces, but all I saw was a terrifying clown. I remembered that Amelia was standing beside me. Thank God she couldn’t see what I saw.

  “What’s the matter with my face?” I asked.

  “You used to be such a happy clown, and now you look scary. You look like worry and fear.”

  I didn’t bother with the psychiatrist. If Amelia was seeing clowns, it had to be genetic. Or contagious, but I didn’t even want to think about that. We sat down and talked, and she told me that her teacher was a sad clown, and the other kids were happy or silly or sad or scared. I asked her when she started seeing clowns, and she said she’d always seen them, she just hadn’t known they were clowns until we went to the circus.

  “I see clowns too,” I told her, “and I’m worried because your clown looks sad.”

  “I don’t like seeing everybody’s inside feelings,” Amelia said. “Have you looked at the cat?”

  “Midnight?” The cat seemed fine, perched on top of the bookshelf. “She looks okay to me. What do you see?”

  “I don’t want to share it with you,” Amelia said. “I think you don’t like seeing the clowns.”

  “You didn’t make me see clowns,” I reassured her, “It was something about the circus—”

  “No,” Amelia said. “It was me. I thought you wanted to see what I saw.”

  I didn’t really believe her, but I didn’t want her to feel bad. “Okay, no problem. I see what you see, but not the cat. Let’s share that too.”

  She touched my cheek, and one of her clownface tears faded away. Seeing clowns wasn’t so bad. I could deal with a clown-cat if it would make my little girl happier.

  I looked up at Midnight.

  Perched on the bookshelf was a cat-sized spider, with beady black eyes and hairy legs. I flinched, but managed not to scream. “Has she always looked like that? I mean, to you?”

  Amelia shook her head. “I think she’s sick.”

  “We’ll take her to the vet.”

  *

  The vet was a tired-looking clown with faded blue hair. The waiting room was full of hideous creatures—dog-sized maggots and featherless birds and a guinea pig that didn’t have a face. Amelia was completely unfazed, and sat with our giant spider-cat on her lap.

  This was my new world, her world, full of horrifying animals and clown faces.

  A happy clown came out of the treatment room with an ordinary-looking dog. I hoped the vet could cure our cat. I hated spiders. I almost wished I hadn’t volunteered to see what Amelia saw. Then I saw her contented little clown face. If sharing these nightmarish visions was what it took to make her happy, I wouldn’t flinch away.

  I stroked one of Midnight’s furry legs and tried to pretend the hissing noise was a purr.

  HARMONIES OF TIME

  You do not know me yet, my love, but I can hear you in my future. You are there from the beginning—at first just a few stray notes, but your presence quickly grows into a beautiful refrain. I wish you could hear time as I do, my love, but this song was never meant to be heard. The future should be chronobviated, gathered up in feathery pink fronds with delicate threads that waver in and out of alternate timelines. The past should be memographed, absorbed into a sturdy gray tail that stretches back to the beginning of the universe. We humans have neither fronds nor tails, but when the Eternals wanted to talk to us, they found a way to work around that.

  The melody of my past is simple.

  When I was ten years old, I heard my mother’s voice for the first time. The doctors worried that I might be too old to adapt to the change. They told me that the sensation might be overwhelming. They explained that sound wouldn’t be the same for me as for a chil
d born with hearing. But none of that mattered. As a ten-year-old child, I saw the procedure as a way to be normal, just like all the other kids, and I jumped at the chance.

  When the doctors turned my cochlear implant on for the first time, I was in a quiet room. My mother gave me a moment to adjust to the hum of the lights, and then she spoke to me. She told me that she loved me, signing as she said the words. When I heard her voice, I cried.

  I never dreamed that in my lifetime I would gain another sense, but when the Eternals made first contact, they did not ask for politicians or for scientists. They asked for people like me. I had already learned a new sense, and I already had external sensors wired into my nervous system. With my permission, the Eternals altered my cochlear implant, and what they sense as time I hear as music. So much of what they wanted to say to us was contained in the harmonies of the future; they felt they couldn’t communicate with us any other way.

  It was disorienting at first, far worse than when my cochlear implant had been turned on. That had simply been a cacophony of sound, and the doctors had kept the room quiet to ease my transition. My new sense was a cacophony of time, and not even the Eternals could silence it. Every possible future of the universe echoed in my brain, and it nearly drove me mad. It was you that saved me, my love, even though we have not met. The possibility of you gave me something to hold on to. Something human, something simple, something real.

  In the harmonies of my future, we meet today and tomorrow and next year and never. It is impossible to say for sure, but you sound closer now, so I suspect the time is near. I joke and you laugh. This is important, because in the strands of harmony where this doesn’t happen, I tend to lose you. We date for weeks and months and years and not at all. I have the advantage of knowing which harmonies end well, so I will take you on the zip line tour that you will love, and avoid that disastrous trip to France.

  I propose and you propose and we never speak of marriage. We have a beautiful ceremony in a church and on a beach and at the county courthouse. All our friends come to celebrate with us, or we elope and celebrate alone. We honeymoon in Mexico and Spain and Alaska and sometimes not at all because we can’t afford the trip. We buy a house and live with your parents and rent a one bedroom apartment on the twenty-fourth floor of a high-rise.

  Sometimes we have children and sometimes not. Either way is fine with me, love, but there are things I can’t control, even with everything I know. We have two girls and one boy and no children even though we try. We lose children before they are born and from sickness I can not prevent and as a soldiers in a foreign war. There are strands in the harmony where you resent me for failing to stop these things. There are strands where I hate myself. But there are other strands with so much joy. Yes, either way is fine with me. The happiness is worth the risk.

  We grow old together and alone, but the aging is inevitable—avoided only by death. We get glasses and you get a hearing aid, and the harmonies of time start to slip away from me. I prefer the strands where you are at my side when I die, but sometimes you pass first and I am there with you.

  The Eternals warned us of a catastrophe that will and won’t happen, two million years from now. They believed their message was urgent. They failed to comprehend the timescale of our lives, even after we explained. Once they had given their warning, they left in search of others who could not foresee the coming danger.

  I kept my implant, even after the Eternals moved on. I am changed forever by this sense of what has been and what may someday be. Even when the song threatens to overwhelm me, I must listen. I would not cut out my eyes because light is too bright; I would not cut out my tongue after tasting something bitter. I cling to the song of time even though it makes me doubt my connection to humanity. I am different, yes. But I still cry when I think of my mother’s voice, cracking with emotion as she tells me that she loves me, the first time I ever heard her. The memory helps me remember who I am, no matter how disconnected I may feel. That memory is the next best thing to having you.

  The harmonies of when we meet collapse into a single note, and we are meeting now. I tell a joke, and wait for you to laugh. Oh, I hope you laugh. Please, please laugh. It would be so hard to lose you, now that you are here.

  For an agonizing moment I wait, and the harmonies of our future waver. Then you laugh, a sound as sweet as the first time I heard my mother’s voice. A sound that bodes well for our future.

  In ninety-eight percent of all the harmonies I hear, I love you.

  Part 2:

  FANTASY WORLDS

  STONE WALL TRUTH

  Njeri sewed the woman together with hairs from a zebra tail. Her deer-bone needle dipped under the woman’s skin and bobbed back out. The contrast of the white seams against her dark skin was striking.

  “The center seam makes a straight line,” Njeri told her apprentice, “but the others flow with the natural curves of the body, just as the Enshai River follows the curve of the landscape.”

  Odion leaned in to examine her work, his breath warm on the back of her neck. Foolish boy, wasting his attention on her. Njeri set her needle on the table and stood up to stretch. The job was nearly done—she’d repositioned the woman’s organs, reconstructed her muscles, sewn her body back together. Only the face was still open, facial muscles splayed out in all directions from the woman’s skull like an exotic flower in full bloom.

  “Why sew them back together, after the wall?” Odion asked. “Why not let them die?”

  Njeri sighed. The boy had steady hands and a sharp mind, but his heart was unforgiving. He had been eager to learn about the cutting, about the delicate art of preparing a patient to hang from the wall. What he questioned was the sewing, the part of the work that had drawn Njeri to this calling. She studied the woman on the table—the last surviving grandchild of Radmalende, who had been king when the country was ruled by kings instead of warlords. The two of them had come of age the same spring, and had taken their adulthood rites together. That had been many years ago, but it was hard for Njeri not to think of her childhood friend by name. “You think I should leave her to die?”

  “Her bones were black as obsidian.” He traced the center seam with his finger.

  Njeri said nothing. She admired the woman for her strength; she hadn’t cried or protested or made excuses. Few women were put on the wall, but this one had faced it as bravely as any man, braver than some. And her shadowself had been like nothing Njeri had ever seen. Dark, of course, but a tightly controlled blackness, an army of ants marching out from her heart and along her bones. A constantly shifting shadow that never rested too long in any one place.

  “She made a play for the throne. Killed six Maiwatu guardsmen in the process. Her attack has opened the way for the Upyatu. I heard a rumor today the capitol is still under siege.” Odion masked the worry in his voice, but Njeri knew he was concerned. He had many friends in the upper echelons of the ruling class—it was how he came to be apprenticed to the highest ranking surgeon at the longest stretch of wall.

  “There is always unrest in the capitol.” Njeri didn’t add that this woman had a stronger claim to the citrine throne than most. “Besides, it’s not our place to say what people deserve. General Bahtir pays us to take people apart and put them back together, not to judge them.”

  Njeri nudged Odion aside. She settled back into her stool, and he went outside to set some water boiling for tea. He didn’t appreciate being pushed away, didn’t understand why she didn’t want him the way he wanted her. She wanted to tell the boy to find someone his own age, someone who liked boys, but Odion wouldn’t listen. Njeri returned to her work. The woman’s jawbone hung slack below her skull, but her mouth still closed around the clear stone that held her mind while Njeri patched her body together. The woman’s eyes stared up at the thatched straw roof, empty, with nothing but bone surrounding them. Flayed open, everyone looked wide-eyed and afraid. Njeri visualized how her muscles should fit together to recreate her strong chin and high cheekbones.


  “Ever wonder what you’d look like on the wall?”

  Njeri tensed at the interruption, then relaxed. Odion knew better than to startle her while she sewed, but she hadn’t taken up the needle yet. The boy was certainly persistent in seeking her attention. She considered his question. The work she did was good, healing those who came off the wall, but she had her share of secrets, her share of shame. Life demanded dark things sometimes, she didn’t need the wall to tell her that. What would her balance be? She hoped the good in her would be enough to cancel out the darkness, but she could not say for sure.

  “I do,” Odion said, finally. “Wonder, I mean. I’ve never seen anyone clean—not on the smaller wall in Zwibe, and not here.”

  “True, that.” Njeri picked up her needle, ending the conversation, and began to reconnect the muscles of the woman’s mouth. She stitched the entire face together without taking a break, though by the end her fingers ached.

  When the sewing was finished, Njeri made Odion examine her work. It served two purposes. First, it was good for the boy to learn the ritual of checking and rechecking before the patient was restored to consciousness. Ripping out seams already sewn was a tedious process, but a mistake caught now could be corrected. After the mindstone was removed, however, mistakes meant pain and often death. She had to train the boy to be observant, to notice the slightest error. Second, of course, was that Odion’s eyes and hands were fresh—he was more likely to catch a mistake if she’d made one.