The Tiger Flu

by Larissa Lai

  The rain stops at dawn, and a thin yellow light comes through the sheer curtains. She sits up, drops her feet to the cold floor, and shuffles around until she finds her tattered bamboo-fibre slippers. She pushes the curtains of her window aside. That yellow light pressures the heavy layer of pollution that lies over Saltwater City all through the dry season. On the western horizon, Old Chang rises. She gazes at him and wonders about all the things he once did for the people of the time before.

  4

  A STRANGER IN THE WOODS

  KIRILOW GROUNDSEL // GRIST VILLAGE

  NODE: KERNELS PLUMP

  DAY: 1

  I LAY OUT THE PRECIOUS HARVEST ON ICE BROUGHT DOWN FROM THE mountains by our first-year initiates, all thirteen-year-old girls from Grist Village. At the door to my cave, Auntie Radix’s young groom is waiting. Soon the eyes that are darkening in that old doubler’s head will shine bright as halogen headlights. Not that I’ve ever seen halogen headlights, but I know the songs. Maybe you can wash my car, yes, I’m gonna flee a star. I know what stars are. They twinkle a little. They light up my wife. I know what cars are too. They are what the people from the time before used to get around, instead of walking. They doubled as wheelbarrows, for transporting food and herbs and found treasures.

  “I’m so tired, Kiri,” my beloved Peristrophe says when Auntie Radix’s young groom is gone.

  “I know, my love, I know.” I gather Peristrophe’s frail, over-harvested body into my arms. The exhilaration of the cut has left me, and I’m gripped by a sudden melancholy. Our old cave, with its battered armchairs and tattered tiger-skin rug from the time before, suddenly looks grey and grim. The herbs I hang from the rafters shudder as the room grows colder, casting sinister shadows on the crumbling earthen walls. “Take some more moonshine, dear one,” I tell her, thinking about how I’ll release the mushroom stitches in a week or so, when her new eyes begin to push into the empty slashes. “To ensure the memory of the pain won’t linger.”

  “So tired,” she whispers.

  I rock her gently. “Sleep, my sweet.” I refuse the fear that I’ve really done it this time, imagine tamping it under a thick layer of warm earth. Still, doubt seeps into me like the draft that has entered the room. Does she feel it too? Her body exudes a mournful kind of trust so palpable it is almost heat. I could not bear to lose her. And bad as it would be for me, it would be worse for Grist Village. She is our last starfish.

  NODE: KERNELS PLUMP

  DAY: 9

  WHEN AUNTIE RADIX ASKS FOR PERISTROPHE HALLIANA’S HEART, I tell her no. I’m at her bedside, summoned here after her new groom cut her wrong. Her old groom died last year of the flu, and her new groom is young and green—too green for the job she does. She should still be with the other initiates, running ice down from the mountains on clear days when the air at altitude is breathable. Her small hands are dexterous but unpractised. Her eyes glow the emerald green of excess forget-me use.

  “Green grow the rushes O,” I sing.

  The new groom doesn’t sing with me. She doesn’t know this song. The initiates have no one to teach them the rhymes of the time before.

  I feel dirty, cutting Auntie Radix for her, slipping my digits into Auntie Radix’s floppy sockets. This isn’t the ritual. This isn’t the way it’s done. The chivalry of the shiv says each groom takes care of her own—doubler or starfish, depending on fate. You don’t take care of another groom’s sexy suture. It’s not right. It’ll make Chang fall faster than he is already falling. This is the alternate hour, when he hangs directly above Grist Village, too round and too low in his deteriorating orbit. His gross gravity tugs at my liver and makes me queasy.

  I stay with Old Radix and her new groom until Eng rises on the southern horizon, blue and small but still visible through the smoky air outside the four windows built into the wall that closes off Auntie Radix’s cave. The elites of Saltwater City control Eng’s insides, as they control those of her brother, Chang, but we can still enjoy her glow. We worship her an avatar of Our Mother. As her period lengthens, her gravitational effects get weaker. My heart aches the special ache it only aches for her. I should get back to Peristrophe Halliana.

  Auntie Radix blinks her peepers open, gazes at me through the true brown eyes of my own best beloved. Jeepers creepers.

  “My heart is failing, Kirilow,” she says, misty mournful as lonely Eng, though not nearly as sweet.

  Oh no, I think, though I don’t say it. She’s our last doubler, and coming to the end of her fertility. We should have stopped calling upon her to pop out young ones a decade ago. She’s a miserable whiner, but the teachings of Our Mother say,

  Behold, the last

  Doubler is gold

  I sat that class carefully.

  It means, Glorybind Groundsel told me, if the Grist is dying down to the last doubler, her word is flesh, her word is god. You can’t say no.

  But all my fibres scream it. No more I love yous. My own heart howls like a child’s. My mouth says, “I don’t quite get your meaning, auntie.”

  She takes a deep breath, then narrows her eyes. “Arrhythmia, Kirilow. Don’t pretend you don’t understand.”

  I sigh. “I hear your concern.”

  “Well, then?”

  “If Peristrophe Halliana gives her heart so soon, she might not make it.” I would really rather not be having this conversation.

  “Not my problem,” says Old Radix. “You may not respect me much, Kirilow Groundsel, but you have a duty to the Grist sisterhood. Without me, the sisterhood won’t make it.”

  “Who says I don’t respect you?” I protest, alarmed as I say it to feel whatever respect I had for her dwindle to nothing.

  “Spoiled child. Don’t you dare think I don’t know. But I don’t care what you think. I need a new heart soon. You know your duty.”

  I cogitate with all my being. Too slow, I say, “The Grist sisterhood won’t survive without the starfish Peristrophe Halliana. Mama Glory says a balance must be struck.”

  “Humph,” says Old Radix, because she knows I have a point.

  “I’ll consult with my mother double and tell you what’s possible.”

  I escape Auntie Radix’s dark cave and rush out into the night air, fresh and bright as the day’s smog recedes back to the city it came from.

  NODE: KERNELS PLUMP

  DAY: 12

  I FEEL THE PULL OF CHANG AS HE RIDES UP THE EVENING SKY. TONIGHT, he faces us, and through the smog I can see the logo of HöST, the company who made and launched him in the long-ago days of oil. Every day he orbits closer. Old Glorybind says that he and Eng are the same size, and that once upon her time, they had periods of twelve hours each and appeared to earthbound Grist sisters just slightly larger than the moon. Now, Chang rules our sky, rises and sets every two hours, while Eng spirals away from us, high and unpredictable.

  “HEO,” says Mother Glorybind. “For highly elliptical orbit. Once upon a time, people could calculate. Maybe in Saltwater City they still can. We Grist sisters feel our way to other knowings.”

  I nod, though I have no idea what she is talking about. Gotta learn faster, before I lose her. I don’t want to think about that and push it from my mind.

  Tonight, Chang’s gravity tugs at the spindly trees and makes their leaves rustle. A thin metallic light drifts through the pollution and illuminates the forest floor, making everything glimmer ghostly.

  Below the bluff that shapes the path between my cave and Auntie Radix’s, I see something shift and jerk against the wind. The bluff rides high and steep over the valley below. Invasive eucalyptus crowd in on me and hide the figure running down there. A body of smoke from the forest fires up north fills the valley. A breeze nudges trees in the valley, revealing then obscuring the forest floor. There’s a red flash of hair. It’s a biped, like us. One of those sneaky creeps from Saltwater City? But unlike us, tall, pale, and gangly. Our genes don’t express like that. We manifest crow-black hair, autumn-leaf skin, and short legs.

/>   I shudder, remembering last year’s militia attack. We were lucky. It was a small advance guard, and we got them all. In my humble opinion, we should have moved the village afterwards, but Auntie Radix was against it.

  I track the Salty along the edge of the bluff, meek and sweet as hello kitty. I catch a whiff of its shit and sweat stink on an updraft, and gag softly.

  It stumbles into a clearing. Gotcha! I throw a knife at it, neatly severing its left hand. It screams and dashes into the brush.

  The severed hand lies there in the clearing, reflecting Chang’s metallic light. Blood pools from the cut veins. I step off the path onto the loose gravel, through more eucalyptus and spindly sage that give onto the valley floor. My first step lands solid, but the second sets a cascade of gravel flowing down the escarpment. I ride it, thankful for the sturdy elk-skin boots that Peristrophe Halliana sewed for me while recovering from her last surgery.

  I walk cautiously forward, brace through the thighs to keep it slow and steady, though the slope wants me to run. When I think it can’t get any steeper, the path becomes a straight drop. I turn around and climb backwards as though down a ladder. When I reach the narrow ledge at the bottom of the drop, I turn again. A pair of eyes watches me from the forest just beyond the clearing. The Salty I saw? What if there is a full Saltwater City militia in the forest, watching and waiting to ambush me?

  My gaze darts between the eyes in the forest and the severed hand, that gleaming horde of genetic treasure, right there in the middle of the clearing. To nab it on my own would be risky. If I were smart, I’d leave it, bide for a better chance when I have Glorybind Groundsel or a posse of initiates with me.

  I’m not smart. I scramble the rest of the way down, half running, half rolling, and dash through rough bush and brambles into the clearing. The Salty rushes out. Dives into the clearing, blood still dripping from its hastily bound wound. It snatches up the severed hand just seconds before I get there, then stumbles back into the woods. I tear after it, muttering, “Our Mother who art artful, Our Mother of moss …” I follow the shuddering of the trees and the intermittent blood spatter staining needles, earth, leaves, and stone. I follow fast as the winds that hail the new monsoons.

  Slam! Here’s Mourning Rock. The forest lies dead still. The blood trail is gone, and the Salty is nowhere to be seen.

  “WHAT DO YOU SUPPOSE IT WAS LOOKING FOR?” I ASK PERISTROPHE Halliana back at our cozy cave.

  She sits up. “Will you take out my stitches? My new eyes are deuce itchy.”

  My tunic is torn, my hair is full of burrs, I’m covered in bruises, and my hands are filthy. “Give me a minute to wash up.” I open the tap and let run a precious trickle of water from our rooftop cistern, opened to the sky only on clean rain days. Dip a dry rag into the half-full sink, and in the precious mirror from the time before, check my face for dirt and blood.

  “I suspect it was looking for us,” she says. “You better catch it.” She slumps back onto her mushroom-fibre pillow.

  5

  WET MARKET ENCOUNTER

  KORA KO // SALTWATER FLATS

  NODE: KERNELS PLUMP

  DAY: 2

  KORA WATCHES THE SKY BRIGHTEN. SHE GAZES AT CHANG UNTIL HE is full and round. Then she puts on the brown bamboo-fibre dress Uncle Wai gave her and layers on her warm padded jacket. She slips out of the quiet apartment and up the stairs to the roof to begin the morning’s chores. She can hear Charlotte and Wai shouting at one another the moment she lifts the rooftop hatch. She comes up into the light. Her eyes burn with the horror of what she sees.

  Delphine swings by her hind legs from the ceiling of the shed. Thrashes fearsomely. Blood gushes from her hooved friend’s throat and soaks the bamboo-fibre mat on which the goat slept last night.

  Charlotte stands before the pen wielding a bloody knife, eyes blazing sorrow and desperation.

  Uncle Wai clutches the kicking body, trying to calm the goat and staunch the gushing blood. At the same time, he yells at Charlotte, “No shame and no self-control! You’re a child. How will Kora and Godwin Austen feel? You’re selfish. You think of no one’s feelings but your own.”

  Charlotte doesn’t yell back. Instead, her voice comes deep and low and slow. “If you’d agreed to kill that bleating nanny a year ago, the kids would have had some decent food to eat instead of your lousy rotten potatoes. K2 might not have gotten sick. You’re the selfish one, protecting Kora’s feelings at the cost of K2’s life.”

  “Don’t be melodramatic. K2 is still alive, and he might get better.”

  The bleeding, bleating goat kicks and thrashes. Uncle Wai looks like he’s gone for a swim in a red pool.

  “You don’t know anything of what I’ve suffered. I should never have left your brother.”

  “Don’t say that.” He grips the goat as its thrashing slows.

  “We’d be living in wealth and comfort instead of shame and poverty.”

  “Our love was real.”

  “Was it, Kai Wai? Really? Aren’t you a little old to believe in such garbage?”

  The goat kicks, then grows still. Uncle Wai gazes into its dying eyes. “Yes,” he says. “I believe in such garbage. And I believe in Kora.”

  “Well, good,” Charlotte says. “You better treasure her and make sure she lives. Because I have only two children now.”

  He stares at her.

  “That’s right. My eldest son, Everest, is dead.”

  Kora realizes she’s been holding her breath.

  “Dead?”

  “His father left a message this morning.”

  Though she never knew Everest, a wave of grief slams Kora. She draws in a great, gasping gulp of air.

  Her uncle sees her and dives towards her. But Kora has already turned. She runs down the stairs, through the apartment, out the door, and into the main stairwell, all the way to the ground level. Down Hastings Street she flees, past the N-lite junkies stoned on history, past the scale exchange where denizens routinely swap out shimmering flakes and tendrils of information in a desperate attempt to know and so fix the broken world.

  Uncle Wai lumbers along behind her like a sick bear. In her mind’s eye, Kora sees the goat’s throat gush red and furious. She runs faster, turns the corner, and scuttles into the wet market. She darts in and out among the stalls of cans recovered from the time before, whirls and turns through the market in a frantic, antic dance, tears past sellers of salmon jerky from the Coast Salish Timeplace, lush fruits from the UMK, salvaged coffee from Seattle Before, squashes and fresh rabbit from Houston North, elk-skin gloves and raw forget-me-do purportedly from the mythic village of Grist. Everywhere she turns there are women from all walks of Saltwater City life—vendors and engineers, dockworkers and office staff.

  At last, the flap of Uncle Wai’s tired feet against ancient concrete stops. She pauses to catch her breath by a stall of can sellers.

  “Hey!” shouts a voice. “Thief!”

  “I’m not stealing.” Kora turns to face a girl her own age, a fearsome one with kohl-rimmed eyes and spiky scales jutting out in all directions.

  “Well, what are you doing then?” The girl taps the counter beside her, on which are laid out a heap of precious-because-extinct tuna tins. “Empty your pockets.”

  “As if,” scoffs Kora. She turns to find the next corner around which to disappear. But there are two more ghoulish girls behind her, their eyes rimmed dark. One of them hisses at her through a set of brown and jagged teeth.

  Kora empties her pockets. There is nothing in the left but a dirty handkerchief. The right has a hole in it and produces nothing.

  “Ptaw,” says the girl behind the counter, glaring. “Pathetic! All that scurrying about and you don’t even have a little can of clams in your pocket?”

  Kora has bought cans like these from Cordova Dancing Girls before, very rarely, for her uncle when he couldn’t get out of bed. But the only conversations she’s had with them have been bartering ones.

  She swallows phlegmy f
ear and shrugs her shoulders. “Should I?”

  “Well, why are you darting around like a little robber if you aren’t one?”

  The girl with bad teeth exhales foul breath in her ear.

  Kora digs deep for bravado. “None of your business, tin-can lady.”

  “Oooooooh, feisty, is it?” says the counter girl.

  Kora takes a long silent inhale, then snatches her handkerchief back. “Well, see ya.”

  The fearsome girl grabs Kora’s wrist. “Not so fast. What sheltered brat comes running into the wet market unless she’s after something? Or running from something, is that it?”

  Kora tries to pull her arm back, but the other two girls close in behind her so tight that lice leap from their dirty skins and scamper across Kora’s bare neck. She draws her knee up quick and gives the table a good swift kick. Cans of salmon, tuna, crab, and char roll off in all directions. The fearsome girl lets go. Kora turns, elbows one henchwoman sharp in the guts. Gulps. Slaps the other hard across the cheek. Then runs back the way she came, suddenly eager to be home.

  6

  THE SALTY’S HAND

  KIRILOW GROUNDSEL // GRIST VILLAGE

  NODE: GRAIN IN BEARD

  DAY: 1

  MY MOTHER DOUBLE AND I ARE OUT HARVESTING FORGET-ME-DO—OUR most precious crop, bred alongside us three generations ago in the factories of Saltwater City, refined by us here at Grist Village, and now seeded through mallow, agave, and sage. Through its use, we cultivate what we remember and what we forget in order to make Grist history. Under my mother double’s watchful eye, I developed my own strain to suit first and foremost the needs of Peristrophe Halliana.

  I’m absorbed in selecting the brightest leaves and at first don’t notice the trees rustling and shivering below us as a creature moves through them. It steps into an open patch of light and stops. I draw my opera glasses out of their pouch and whip them up to my eyes. It’s the same Salty I saw two days ago, grey-eyed and weak now. It pauses, as though it senses my presence. Raises its gaze to the bluff and draws its right hand up to shield its eyes from the light.