The Tiger Flu

by Larissa Lai

  That’s the way the cookie crumbles, I tell my beloved Peristrophe Halliana, as I work my knives. Once they are good and sharp, I wipe them down with mother moonshine. We make it ourselves in claw foot tubs from the time before. With potatoes cropped from our own fields, you know, Mistress Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? We pretty maids, we Sisters Grist, some call us tub puppets, fuck moppets, matchstick monkeys. Who cares? We will outlive them all, in beds of our own making.

  As I prepare my knives, I rant the chant the grannies gave me, the one that Grandma Chan Ling heard from the dirt, so long ago. My mother double, Glorybind Groundsel, smoking medicinal marijuana in the old rosewood pipe she inherited from Grandma Chan Ling herself, chants with me to make sure I get the words right. She teaches me my genealogy. You know, like, where we came from. What we’re here for. “You must hold these things, Kirilow,” she tells me. “We hold all that remains of the old world’s knowledge in our raw brains. That means we need to be extra smart.”

  She teaches me how to be a good groom to my beloved Peristrophe Halliana, the last starfish among us, the last giver. It isn’t easy, you know—to have and to hold, to kiss and to cut. Slit sluts, that’s what they call us in Saltwater City. I’m not ignorant, I know what they say. It’s why they expelled our grannies eighty years ago. For having and holding. For slicing and stitching. What did they expect from us anyhow? That they could keep making us again and again and again and again? Bust us from their greasy bottles like so many cheap gene genies? As if.

  Grandma Chan Ling invented the partho pop, you know, how we egg ourselves along—I mean, the long, lizardy love of the Grist sisters. We split, we slit, we heal, we groom, self-mutated beyond the know-how of the clone company Jemini that spawned us, and the HöST scale and microchip factories that bought our grannies to work for them. But there are flaws in our limited DNA—the DNA of just one woman. We mutate for better and worse, for sickness and health. But more for sickness and worse. Only our starfish can save us, by regrowing whatever grooms like me cut out of them. Grandma Chan Ling invented the kiss cut, the repair job—what do you say? The fix, the patch. The first starfish gave her liver, her kidneys, and, at last, her red-hot heart to the first doubler. And so it was, in the beginning.

  I chant loud as I can to push down the dread that roils in my belly:

  Our Mother of milk and mildew

  Our Mother of dirt

  Our Mother of songs and sighing

  Our Mother of elk

  Blessed are the sheep

  And blessed are the roses

  Blessed are the tigers

  Wind, bones, and onion flowers

  We remember you and we remember rain

  We remember mushrooms holding the globe in their mycorrhizal net

  We remember dust

  We remember meat

  We remember fibre in its weave and fibre in its weft

  The shifting and wobbling of the intentional earth

  After we escaped the sister factories of Saltwater City, Grandma Chan Ling herself doctored it all. Our great progenitress—not only the first doubler but also the first groom, inventor of the loving transplant, the sexy suture. It feels good, you know, don’t doubt it. We mutated the first forget-me-do, not that Isabelle Chow, not those Saltwater killers who claim it for who knows what new wickedness. Forget-me-do makes you feel pain as pleasure. It takes away all memory and feeling of pain, leaves nothing but a craving to be cut again. We cultivated it for the sisterly insertion and the doublers return, two holy ways for one to become two.

  Peristrophe Halliana sips six slugs of mother moonshine infused with forget-me-do. I wipe down the last blade with a seventh. Then the flame, hot so hot. My precious bunsen burner salvaged from the very lab where Grandma Chan Ling was made, in old Saltwater Town, the ruin that somehow keeps on being a city. All railway tracks, mouldy stucco, and tarnished glass skyscrapers. All rain, mud, bedbugs, and rodentia. Rock-a-bye baby, in the cradle of civilization. Not that I’ve ever been there, but my mother double teaches me all the songs and all the history she remembers.

  Thinking about the filth of Saltwater City makes me will my knives super clean. Pour more vodka in to burn baby learn. I’m being followed by a moonshine shadow. Peristrophe Halliana is prone to infection. The cutting might be no big deal, but healing’s a bitch. So knives must shimmer clean, a lean mean clean. I mean, sparkle, twinkle like the lemon muscle man from the time before. Clean as mister. Even though the mistresses are master here.

  The first cut is the sleekest. At the corner of the eye, at the zygomatic process, where the top of the skull attaches to the side of the head. I know my bones. My mother double taught me well. Foot bone connected to the heel bone. Heel bone connected to the ankle bone. Peristrophe Halliana sighs a sleepy sigh of pleasure-pain. I move my fingers beneath her eyeball, the tiniest blade concealed between middle and index. Nudge it out and softly slice the root. She groans. I tug at the globe, and it releases with a gentle squelch and click.

  “Those are pearls that were her eyes,” I sing as blood gushes from her left socket. I cinch it shut, and suture with my finest lichen fibre thread. From her right eye, she gazes at me with love.

  I give her another couple of slugs of mother moonshine. Then, careful so careful, I work my blade on the right. Again, the root. Another squelch, another click. How can Peristrophe have so much blood in her head? I staunch the flow with mushroom gauze, press into the wound until the hot pulse of blood subsides. I stitch her up quick.

  3

  EARTH APPLES

  KORA KO // SALTWATER FLATS

  NODE: KERNELS PLUMP

  DAY: 1

  UP IN THE ROOFTOP GARDENS OF THE CRUMBLING WOODWARD’S Building, where the Ko family has lived for generations, Kora spills potatoes and earth out one of the large earthenware jars. The jar is huge—big enough to hold three Koras and her beloved goat. Although one is lost, there are eleven more on the rooftop. They are old and cracked now, and so fragile that the earth Uncle Wai filled them with last fall pushes at their walls and threatens to split them open.

  She picks up a potato. It is not very big—barely the size of her fifteen-year-old fist. Gnarled and slimy, its rotten surface crawls with wireworms. It smells, not of sweet earth but of putrefaction.

  “Soil’s depleted, uncle,” Kora says. “Do you think we could convince the wet market gardeners to sell us more?”

  Uncle Wai coughs. They both know the wet market farmers will never help them. It’s 2145, and the dollar is dead. The wet market farmers want renminbi, a currency no one in the Ko family earns.

  She examines the potato in her hand, watches a fat white worm wriggle over its rotting skin. She shudders. But if she can accept this horror, then she can accept the unknown horrors coming. She imagines dislodging the white squirmer and putting it in her mouth.

  “Stop daydreaming, Kora,” shouts Uncle Wai as he quickly sweeps earth back into the jar. “Hurry up. Looks like monsoon season is early this year.”

  She raises her gaze skyward. Clouds the colour of bruises rumble across the face of Chang. Kora worries about his increasingly close orbit. Although HöST has vast powers over the citizenry of Saltwater City and Saltwater Flats, it has little power over objects in space, even when that space is relatively close. If HöST were friendly with the neighbouring Cosmopolitan Earth Council, it might be able to push him back out to his original orbit. But HöST is not on friendly terms with the CEC.

  Chang’s actual size doesn’t change, but to those on Earth his lumbering form appears larger with each passing day. The clouds that drift overhead cover his logo-pocked face, grow thick, and threaten to split.

  “Come on, Kora. Let’s go.”

  She can’t help it. The worse things get, the more her mind turns to visions of the future. She sees the men waste and die. She sees whole houses shut their doors against the flu-ridden city, only to be consumed from the inside. Houses packed to the rafters with the corpses of men and boys,
and the girls and women who stayed too close. Houses bursting with rot and sorrow. She sees these things so intensely that they have become the world she already inhabits. She moves through the present as though through mud.

  “Kora!” Uncle Wai’s got a jar lowered halfway, and it’s slipping from his grip. She rushes to help him.

  There was a time when he could empty the jars on his own, guiding them to the garden floor with one hand, while controlling the flow of earth and potatoes with the other. But today, it takes two of them, one old man who is not actually very old and one young woman who is actually still a girl.

  “Soon, niece, you’ll be strong enough to do this on your own. You just need to eat more meat.” He glances up at her through rheumy eyes.

  She works quickly now, wills herself to focus. From the darkness of the rickety shed, Delphine bleats. The goat is already seven years old. Uncle Wai says they’ll have to slaughter her soon, before the meat gets too tough, and while he still has the strength to do it without hurting her. Kora has known the goat since Kora was eight. She dreads having to play a part in the goat’s death, but Uncle Wai says Kora can’t be so soft if she wants to survive in the world that is coming.

  “We’ll do it kindly,” he says.

  “I love the goat, uncle.”

  “I know, child. I know.”

  She begins to tilt another jar. The clouds open suddenly, and the acid torrent drenches them. The water is slightly viscous. Her hand slips, and the jar crashes to the garden floor and splits into a hundred sharp pieces. Dirt and potatoes scatter everywhere.

  There is no time for recrimination.

  “You get the potatoes. I’ll get the earth,” says Uncle Wai. He dashes for the broom.

  Kora digs out a bamboo-fibre sack from the storage bin beside the goat shed and gathers potatoes as fast as she can. Many of them are so rotten, they squelch in her hand, but there is no time to sort. She fires them into the bag while Uncle Wai sweeps the precious dirt into a corner and covers the heap with waxed bamboo cloth. He covers the rain barrels too. This rain is too contaminated to be useful.

  Soaked through, they scurry down the rooftop hatch, carrying the bag of potatoes between them.

  They lurch downstairs like an old bear with two heads. Inside the apartment, they wipe their hands and faces with towels hanging at the foot of the stairs. They remove their tattered raincoats. Kora’s coat hasn’t protected her from much. She goes to her room to change. There, she discovers a new rain burn in the blue cotton dress sent to her by Kai Tak Ko, the father she’s never met. She likes it because it has lots of pockets. She shouldn’t have worn it to the roof. She rinses the burnt corner in the basin of good water reserved for washing face and hands. Where the fabric was stained by bad rain, a hole presents itself. Damn it. She pulls on her only other dress, the one made of mud-brown bamboo fibre that Uncle Wai gave her for her birthday two years ago. She goes to the kitchen.

  At the kitchen table, Kora’s mother and older brother sit, peeling and cutting potatoes. They slice out the rotten parts. They squish wireworms. Charlotte and K2 have a pot going on the stove to cook the good parts into a soup that they can freeze at least until they run out of bamboo to fuel the generator. If the potatoes were healthy and whole, they’d store them in the empty apartment next door, abandoned by their neighbours after the father and brothers succumbed to the flu last winter. But these motley chunks of potato flesh won’t keep on their own.

  Charlotte looks exhausted. Although she’s not yet forty, her dull black hair is streaked with white, and dark pockets of loose skin sag beneath her eyes. She’s the only family member who still has a job, as night nurse at a nearby hospice, and she looks after the whole family on top of that.

  The tall, once handsome Godwin Austen “K2” Ko slouches at the table, thin and pale. Although his twin brother, Everest, never lived with them, the absence that has always haunted K2 seems to scream from his skin. There’s a red, angry lesion on his cheek that could be a rain burn or a sign of the flu worsening. He just turned twenty, but he’s so malnourished and sick with flu, he looks sixteen. He had a job working at his friend Akal Arnouse’s abattoir, just over the border in the Second Quarantine Ring, but Akal was forced to fire him when K2 could no longer lift the carcasses.

  “Your icky friend Stash was here yesterday.”

  “I gave him a key. He’s lost his family and has nowhere to go. I thought maybe he could hang around here sometimes.”

  “He knocked a potato jar over the ledge. Me and Uncle Wai cleaned it up this morning. So that’s two jars we’ve lost in two days.”

  Uncle Wai grunts his displeasure.

  K2 says nothing.

  Kora says, “Don’t you even give a shit? Where do you think our food comes from?”

  “Stash has lost more than a potato jar,” says K2. “Cut him some slack already.”

  “He’s kind of gross.” Should she tell K2 what actually happened? He’s so demoralized already.

  “Yeah, I know, Kora. He’s sick okay? And sad. Be nice to him.”

  Kora doesn’t want to be nice to Stash. “Tell him he’s not welcome. He gives me the creeps.”

  More intense than her loathing for Stash is Kora’s fear of losing them all. It’s not just a fear. It’s a coming certainty. With the heat from the stove and the burden of her grief and worry, Kora can hardly stay awake. Her limbs weigh like depleted earth. The light of the bare fluorescent bulb stings her eyes and her lids droop, then fall.

  She goes down into the dark. In her dream, she sees the Marine Building, engulfed in the flesh of an earth-crawling squid. She has a knife and slices flesh from its side. It makes a thin wailing sound. She puts the flesh in her mouth and chews. It tastes like raw goat.

  In the dream, families line up outside the building. She recognizes neighbours from across the hall: the Drs Bloom and their sons, Avery, Adam, and Archer. The Blooms go into the building through the door that has become a toothy mouth. The sides of the squid-building pulse with a soft pink light. It reaches its tentacles into its crown and tosses the Blooms up into the sky so high they land on the moon.

  Kora has seen the moon lots of times, during monsoon season, when the heavy rains wash the acid sky and reveal what lies high above. But she knows about the moon mostly because of the memory scale that Uncle Wai gave her last year for her fourteenth birthday. With the scale neatly planted in her brain through her halo, she remembers the moon in all its phases—waxing, waning, full, gibbous, new. She remembers that the moon still pulls the tides, though Chang’s deteriorating orbit interferes with the original pattern more and more.

  Avery, Adam, and Archer sit on the surface of the moon, smiling and waving. And then someone else is smiling and waving, so close their face is like the moon. The moon speaks: “Kora, come back to us.”

  A hand passes over her still-closed eyes, making the flickers of light she dreams go suddenly dark. She blinks her eyes open. Her pupils narrow, adjusting to the nasty fluorescent light of the family kitchen. It is not the moon speaking, it is her mother. She is talking to Uncle Wai now.

  “I wish you wouldn’t give her those things, Wai.”

  “She needs memory scales to understand the world that was. They don’t hurt her. She’s gifted is all. And her gift will help her live.”

  Charlotte notices that her daughter is awake. She pats Kora’s arm.

  “I saw the Drs Bloom,” Kora tells them. “I saw Avery, Adam, and Archer. They walked into a giant squid. It tossed them to the moon.”

  “She’s lost her senses,” Charlotte says, stroking Kora’s sweaty hair. Her hand catches on the memory scale and Kora’s brain vibrates gently. For a second, she sees the moon again, round and full.

  THEY HAVE EATEN THEIR POTATO SOUP. KORA IS IN HER ROOM NOW, trying to sleep. She can hear Wai and Charlotte fighting about the goat.

  “You have to do it now, Wai. Before—before—”

  “Before what?”

  “Please. Don’t argue, ju
st take care of it.”

  “Before the muscle wasting sets in? Before the lesions? Before the dementia? Or just sometime before I give up the ghost entirely? What?”

  “Please don’t.”

  “You’re like a child. Do you understand what it means when you act like a child? It means that the children have to act like adults. They need a mother, Charlotte. Kora especially. You see how she sleeps all the time? She’s depressed …”

  “What do you mean, ‘Kora especially’? It’s because you favour her. It’s because you think Godwin Austen is going to die. Who’s equivocating now, Kai Wai?”

  Kora wills her music scale to rifle through its song list, seeking the strongest antidote to family dysfunction. It takes her a few seconds to find the song she’s looking for, during which fragments of their argument continue to seep in.

  “We shouldn’t have—”

  “It’s the only way.”

  “Talk to K2. Perhaps we can change our minds.”

  “One of us must survive, and she is the only one with a chance. This is how we give her the opportunity.”

  “So it’s too late. You’re a coward.”

  She wills them to shut up. They don’t, but soon the voice of Molten Mabel slides over her, claustrophobic and smooth as heavy cream. She shuts out the noise of their fighting by falling into the lyrics.

  In the world that is coming

  Under the reign of ancient Chang

  The Weather Girls are so lonely

  So lonely, so holy

  So hopeful, so different, so changed

  She doesn’t remember the album finishing. This could mean she slept, though she doesn’t feel rested. It’s so early that the sky is still dark. Eng hangs low over the glass towers and emits a pale blue light through the smoggy clouds that cover her face. Kora imagines her family sleeping. She thinks of potatoes growing slowly in the dark. The rain that began yesterday afternoon intensifies, beating against her window. She wants to cry and she wants to sleep but can do neither. She is miserable in a way an old stone is miserable, present to everything but cold, still, and stuck.