Before She Sleeps

by Bina Shah

  “I began to get nervous around him. Why did he look at me like that? And he was starting to slink away from me more often, talking less to me than before. My mother noticed, too. She’d always been very strict that I should never let anyone touch me, that sex was only for married women. It’s in the religious rules, but I guess the Bureau thinks it makes sense for everyone.

  “She told me to go to my room and study, but Z was always watching me, whenever I bent down to take something out of the oven, or reached up high to bring a box down from a cupboard. At first I thought it meant he still liked me, even though it was different than before. At least I wasn’t a stone or a shoe.”

  There were no girls-only schools where Rupa lived, so she went to the regular school in a different neighborhood, the only girl in a class full of boys. She wasn’t allowed to take part in the physical activity sessions; she was sent for a few hours every day to special classes on Civic Duties, a class conducted by a Wife of one of the Perpetuation Bureau officials. I’d gone to a class like that, too. We watched endless films about housekeeping and the science of childcare. They thought that by calling us household engineers and domestic scientists, we’d be fooled into thinking our “jobs” were worthy of our intelligence and self-respect. In reality being a Wife was endless drudgery, washing and wiping and feeding and cleaning, spaced between unending pregnancies.

  Rupa confessed that once upon a time she thought everything they told her was perfectly normal; she even daydreamed about the Husbands she’d be assigned, the children she’d bear to make Green City strong again. For the few girls of Green City, the ones fortunate enough to turn into women, it’s either acquiescence or madness.

  Then came the morning when Rupa came out of the shower and saw the bathroom door had been opened a crack. Someone was spying on her, but there was nobody at the door when she looked. When she tried to tell her mother that Z was starting to frighten her, her mother threatened to lock her in her room. She promised never to talk about it again, and Z left her alone for a few months.

  Rupa dried my hair gently with a towel, her voice neutral, as she told me that several months later Z started to come into her room at night, after her mother had fallen asleep. His hands would roam all over her body and she’d lie there, terrified and silent under his touch. In the mornings he’d act as if nothing had happened. Every night he came to her room, but Rupa kept silent, fearing a beating from her mother if she revealed something so fundamentally wrong. It was worse that her mother wouldn’t believe her, that she willfully closed her eyes to Rupa’s torment.

  Weeks passed and the molestation continued. Z grew more bold, coming to her room even in the day. At night he seemed more and more determined to edge towards the ultimate goal of taking her virginity. The night he tried to take off all her clothes terrified Rupa out of her silence.

  “I thought that getting beaten was still better than letting him do what he wanted. I couldn’t bear it, so I finally told my mother that it had been going on for months.”

  She had forgotten to remove the towel from my shoulders, she was so caught up in her story. She spoke so softly that I had to lean forward to hear. “I thought my mother would kill me on the spot, but she was quiet. Then she went to her room. I couldn’t move. Finally she came out and said I wouldn’t go to school that day. N went to work, then Z left as well. I tried to study but couldn’t concentrate. I gave up and lay down in my bed, looking at the wall.

  “Z came home and my mother gave him his meals in his room. He didn’t come to my room for two nights. The third day, my mother took me into the drawing room. ‘Sit down, Rupa,’ she said. I thought she was ready to talk to me. I thought there would be no secrets between us.”

  “Did she listen? Did she believe you?”

  “She took out her nose pin from her nose, the one I’d always admired, and told me I was finally old enough. At first I didn’t understand what she meant by that …”

  I was mesmerized by her story. I couldn’t stop listening to her words. I was gripping the sides of my chair, feeling all the terror that she was speaking about as if it were happening to me, not her.

  “She pressed her thumb into my right nostril. She pressed hard with the pin, into my flesh. But I didn’t scream, not even once.”

  “She took me by the arm. I’d always thought of her as tiny and delicate, but she pulled me all the way to the door, even though I tried to hold on to the wall with my fingernails. They broke as my mother tore me away.

  “There was a black car waiting for me. I cried, I begged, I apologized, but my mother didn’t listen. She pushed me out and locked the door.”

  The nose pin, which Lin had finally allowed Rupa to wear only in the Panah, winked and flashed, a third eye on her face. It was her mother’s brand, marking Rupa as both her offspring and her outcast for the rest of her life.

  My mind was reeling, my ears ringing with her words. Surely there was something I could say to make sense out of all of this for her, for me? “She was keeping you safe,” I gabbled. “She thought she was doing it for the best, to protect you from him.” It was Z she should have thrown out of the house, not her own daughter. Thoughts of my own mother, of loss and longing, assailed me, and I covered my face with my hands.

  Rupa’s face was drained of blood and emotion. “It was all my fault.” Then, seeing how miserable her story made me, she reached out and hugged me.

  After the confrontation with Rupa, I go back to my room to rest before my assignation, but when I lie down on my bed, I start to cry. I’m not normal, but neither is Rupa. None of us is. Green City stole our normality, our childhoods, our futures. What is normality anyway? We live in bizarre circumstances; either we cope, or we crack and shatter like glass. The Panah has taught me that much; I’ve learned not to mind my own insanity. But Rupa’s newfound love doesn’t seem to have done anything to heal her or make her happier. It’s only honed her dissatisfaction, and she’s torn my defenses with her casual cruelty.

  My tears defeat me, pouring out of my eyes faster than I can wipe them away. In the end, I let the tears soak into my pillow. The love I wanted to give her is a waste; she’s thrown it back at me with both hands. She doesn’t want or need the Panah anymore, now that she’s found true love. She doesn’t need me either, and there’s no feeling worse than that.

  From the Voice Notes of Ilona Serfati

  I spend a lot of my time asleep, resting lightly on the earth that will soon claim me for its own.

  We don’t bury bodies here in the Panah; we have to incinerate them, using chemicals that reduce our bodies to biological ash in a matter of hours. We thought of everything when we set this place up, even the area in the back of the Panah where our cremations take place. Each woman who dies is buried here, ashes scattered around the trees in the Charbagh. Nurturing and replenishing us with the remains of her existence, her cells and atoms become part of our atmosphere. Fairuza hasn’t left us. And soon I’ll join her. If I see her after I die, I have only two questions for her:

  Was it all worthwhile? Was this suffering better than the other way?

  Lin doesn’t know, or if she does, she’s closing her eyes to the truth. She keeps talking about the New Year, the plans she has for improving the garden, the lighting system, whether or not we’ll get another girl in the Panah. Sometimes I want to grab her by the shoulders and ask: “Don’t you understand the situation? By this time next year I won’t be here.” She averts her eyes from mine, and doesn’t let me talk, the wretched girl.

  I’m not worried about her. I’ve trained her well. She runs the place already, she’s like a little dictator with the other girls. I’ve told her to be softer with them, to follow the rules but remember they’re human, they all have broken hearts. Not because they came here, but because they’re girls from Green City.

  Sabine

  I wake up in Joseph’s house, and the morning light hits my eyes like a fist
to the face.

  I wince and turn my head, then move my arms and legs. Even my limbs feel tired. I’ve woken up in the same fetal position I remember I was in when I fell asleep, Joseph pressing himself into my back, his arm around my waist.

  Joseph isn’t there. I rise from the bed, putting my feet gingerly on the floor. Strangely, my hips and thighs feel sore and I stand with difficulty. I try, but I can’t keep track of everything I’m feeling. The fact that I’ve slept through the night is astonishing and new. It must be the champagne he gave me again last night; I’m more sensitive to its effects than I thought. I don’t like it and I’m not doing that again, anytime soon, even if it makes me sleep. This kind of sleep feels wrong, as if I’ve stolen it from someone, and now I’m probably going to pay.

  I move to the gently percolating bath in the corner of the room, sink under the water, and allow the sleep to be washed from my body. The hot, scented water doesn’t lighten me in the least. As I bathe, I fade into a strange vision of Joseph tying weights to my ankles and wrists, a belt of worries tied around my waist. He leads me out to the middle of a large, crystal-colored lake, and makes me lie down on the surface of the water. I’m dragged down to the bottom of the lake, while Joseph swims strongly back to shore.

  The problem with insomnia is that everything feels like a dream, even being awake. It’s dangerous not to know the difference between dream and reality.

  I dry myself off, get dressed, walk into the kitchen. Joseph is making an omelet.

  “There you are!” he says. “You fell fast asleep. I thought I’d let you rest, so I slept in the other room.” He cracks open two cultured eggs, then scans his kitchen display to see what he should add to it—cultured meat, vegetables, or bio-lab cheese; the display will decide based on what Joseph has been eating over the last few days. “I haven’t been getting enough vitamins,” he says out loud. I know he’s talking to himself, not me.

  The display beeps and an image of a pig appears. “Ham it is,” Joseph says cheerfully. They haven’t killed an animal in Green City in fifty years. All beef, eggs, in fact anything natural, is created in a lab with synthetic polymers, proteins, DNA. It’s how Joseph was able to have his liver transplant five years ago, and go on living as a healthy man.

  “Imagine, Sabine, a hundred years ago, the only way to get a new liver was to take a piece of a healthy one from a close relative and implant it in my diseased one and pray that it took.” He laughs at the barbarity of blood and being opened up like an animal on an operating table with knives. Ancient history, he calls it.

  “Aren’t you glad we live in today’s age? Nothing to it. A few hours being injected with the right formula, and in a few weeks, I had a healthy liver again.”

  “Did you never think about not drinking, not eating so much rich food?” I ask.

  Joseph laughs so hard that his belly quivers. I blush, not liking the tone of Joseph’s laugh. It says I can never understand the world he lives in, a stranger to the liberties he’s granted just because of his status in Green City. Then he sees me glancing in the direction of his paunch and puts his hand over it defensively.

  “Darling Sabine,” Joseph says. “There is nothing in this city that isn’t available to me. Food, drink, drugs. Riches, power, pleasure. I’m in the taxation business. That means I am in the fortunate position of being the guardian as well as a consumer of things that people spend their lives working to attain and obtain. Why on earth would I restrict anything for myself, when science has given us every way of eliminating their consequences?”

  Joseph calls me names like sweetheart and darling, expresses longing for my company, fusses when I have to leave, but I never feel that I’ve moved him anywhere deeper. I’m supposed to make him feel cared for and wanted, but I think I hold the same importance for him as an expensive suit, or a car. I’m there to scratch an itch that has nothing to do with his skin.

  I clutch a cup of coffee in my hands as I watch him bend, move, reach for dishes. An image comes to my mind, unbidden, of him crouching over me the same way he’s hunching over the counter. Of him watching me as intently as he watches his eggs cooking in the pan. Of his leg touching my thigh, his knee between mine. It’s the first time I’ve had thoughts like these, and I’m not used to them either. They evoke a sensation in my body that is unsettling and electric. I drop my head, hoping Joseph can’t tell what I’m thinking.

  Joseph hands me a plate with my breakfast on it, but I push it away and put my coffee cup down. “I’ll eat later,” I say. “I have to go. The car is going to be here any minute.”

  For the first time, he doesn’t protest. He sits down and starts to eat, as if I’ve said nothing. He barely glances at me as I go to his bedroom to anoint myself with gold silicon, my fingers trembling. An inexplicable tension ignites in my body. I’m certain I’ve missed a few spots, but fear and fatigue make me careless and clumsy. Hopefully it’s enough to fool the scanners. Not even machines are foolproof; science is only as good as its gatekeepers.

  I stumble out of the bedroom, my veil askew. I need to hurry, I feel as though there’s a train rushing through me. “I have to go,” I say again to Joseph, wanting to avoid the familiar struggle between going and staying.

  Immediately, he pushes his chair back, stands up, sees me to the door, without reluctance, which surprises me. Joseph holds my arm for a moment, lifts the veil back from my head to look deeply into my eyes. I’m reflected in their depths, falling backward. He’s infinitely tender as he replaces the veil on my head, straightens it, and then kisses me on the lips.

  “Go, Sabine. Go now or I won’t be able to control myself.” He laughs at his own confession. It terrifies me and I don’t want to know why.

  I lurch through the lobby of the building and make it onto the street outside. At this time of year, it’s hot enough to strip paint from buildings, incinerate small flowers, boil cultured eggs on your car.

  I glance around frantically, but the street is empty. There’s nobody on either side of the road, which works to my advantage.

  But then a wrenching, sharp pain tears through my abdomen: I press my hand to it and gasp at the pain, ten times worse than period cramps. Where did it come from? I was fine just moments ago. There’s a strange soreness in my back, too, but nothing in comparison to the tumult inside my belly.

  Sweat beads on my forehead. My ears are ringing, my face is turning hot. My sight grows dim. Am I dreaming that the black car drives up just at that moment, stops a few feet from me? If the car idles more than a few minutes, the heat of the engine will register on the scanners; they’ll send an Agency car to investigate. The level of threat is too high; the algorithm is triggered to abort the mission.

  I float down to the ground like a flower wilting slowly, its head bowing to gravity. I slip a little as I fall, my limbs splayed out around me. I’m beyond knowing this now. I’m gone from this world, and it is the second time I’ll sleep so deeply in a space of twenty-four hours, as if I’m trying to catch up with the last twenty-four years of my life.

  Lin

  She sat in the rose garden with Reuben, at the end of another night. The sky was overlaid with thick clouds, the sun struggling to break through. They were both silent but satisfied, unneedful of words to maintain the connection between them. The high walls around the garden added to the illusion that the world could not intrude on their momentary refuge.

  Reuben had his arm around Lin’s shoulders. His usual restlessness had ebbed away, leaving the essence of the man behind, what he would be like all the time without the demands of the City and his job.

  Lin wondered to herself, Is this what it feels like?

  Just as she was about to lean her head on Reuben’s shoulder before kissing him goodbye, her device let out an urgent beep, followed by a pulsing that grew stronger with every second. This wasn’t the usual alert to announce the arrival of the car. This was something different.
>
  Lin took out the device and pressed the key to display the message. As she read, Reuben watched her face change expressions and her skin drain of all color.

  “What’s wrong?”

  Her hand was at her mouth, and for a moment she couldn’t speak. Reuben had to shake her before she could tell him.

  “It’s Sabine. She was out last night with­—with Joseph. She was supposed to be picked up right now.”

  “What’s the matter? Is she all right?” Reuben had heard about this man, how he was enamored of Sabine, who was like steel, Lin had said, she wasn’t interested in that sort of thing with a Client. And so far, Joseph had kept his hands off her. Reuben believed the young women could adhere to the no-sex contract, but it was no surprise the men grew tired of it. And what girl could withstand that kind of pressure, if a man truly wanted her body?

  Lin shook her head. “She wasn’t there at the pickup point. The car left without her. She never came back.”

  Reuben knew he had to act fast, before Lin put herself in danger. As she jumped up and began to stride towards the gate, he caught her and held her back. “Go home. Go to the Panah right now.”

  “How can I?” Lin was incredulous. “I can’t just leave her there. I have to go get her.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Reuben. “Just tell me where he lives.”

  Part 2

  Rebellion

  From The Official Green City Handbook for Female Citizens

  The Gender Emergency is in its last years; we are fully on the way to recovering the population numbers of Green City before the War. You have been crucial in boosting the numbers up to normal levels, but we still need your efforts and your devotion in order to stabilize and secure Green City’s future. Your sacrifices will not go unrewarded; your pain will not have been in vain. When you can look upon a city bustling with girls, you will know that you had a direct hand in turning this dream into reality. If you willingly give your bodies to us in trust, we are honor-bound to return your trust a thousandfold. This is our promise to you as full citizens of Green City. Rebelling against our generosity, on the other hand, is synonymous with transgressing against society and will be answered with reeducation as deemed necessary by the authorities. So be mindful you do not even come near the limits of rebellion, in thought or in action.