Before She Sleeps

by Bina Shah

  But Faro’s fingers were already touching her face, strong and firm, finding coldness where he was expecting warmth. Then he lowered his fingers to her neck, pressing her throat in search of her pulse. Bouthain knew it would be too thready for anyone but an experienced physician to detect.

  “Sabine? Are you awake?” said Faro. He turned back to Bouthain.

  Bouthain glanced at his watch. “It’s been six hours. Rigor mortis has come and gone. In another hour, she’ll start to decompose. We have to get her to crematorium before that happens. You, on the other hand, must go straight to quarantine; you’ll infect other people if you don’t.”

  But Faro ignored him, murmuring to her in a voice that was soft yet urgent. “Wake up, Sabine. Wake up!” His fingers were still lying lightly on Sabine’s neck. Would he reach around with both hands until they encircled her throat, and squeeze tight? Bouthain felt himself go numb.

  At last Faro removed his fingers from Sabine’s throat. He took out his device, turned on the camera, and aimed it at Sabine’s face. The device let out a small beep, and then he was backing away, straightening himself with caution, as if moving too fast caused him pain. Finally at some distance, Faro rested his hands on his hips, arms bent sharply at his elbows, shoulders squared. His eyes, dark and watchful, looked wet and he was blinking hard. Bouthain pitied him. Faro was no monster; he was a man trapped in a life that promised him absolute power but in return had stripped him of everything good and honorable. The Agency had taken a man who might have been a kind husband, a loving father, and turned everyone who might have loved him into his enemy. Maybe this was just the moment to appeal to his better sense. Or his mercy, if he had any left. “So if everything’s in order, we’ll be on our way,” said Bouthain. “All right, Faro? Mañalac, let’s go.”

  Faro pursed his lips and shook his head. “Not so fast.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  Faro’s eyes had hardened; his glance was a sharp knife. “Tell me, Rami. Why have you come all the way here with two corpses and a nurse, in a quarantine ambulance? Don’t you have more important things to do at the hospital right now?”

  “Well, I …” Bouthain spoke carefully, slowly, as if testing each word for its viability before releasing it. He dared not look at Mañalac now. “Well, to tell you the truth, this is a very personal journey for me.”

  “How so?”

  “Dr. Asfour … Julien. I was very fond of him. And wanted to see him off myself.”

  “So he was your friend?” Faro’s voice was gentle with understanding. Then it grew brutal. “Or was it something more between the two of you?” The insinuation that there was something illicit between Bouthain and Julien hung in the air like the dust motes surrounding them, the remnants of the storm’s passage from the mountains down to Green City, miles away. The rules of Green City were equally far from them; distance made its diktats appear weak and watered-down.

  “I’m too old for that sort of thing, Reuben. That might be hard for you to imagine. But he was my star pupil. He had so much promise. And now he’s dead. So can you give him some dignity here?”

  “I wish I could do that,” said Faro. “But I can’t. My superiors already know a woman has broken cover, emerged from underground. She’s dead now, so there’s nothing to be done about that. But someone has to answer for everything that happened at the hospital. Frankly, about Dr. Asfour’s suicide, well, your explanation sounds flimsy. I’m sure there’s a better one you can give me instead. I wish you’d called me, Rami, I really do. I could have helped. We could at least have saved Dr. Asfour, you and I. Anyway, this is the end for you. You won’t go any farther.”

  “But what about their bodies?” said Bouthain. “We can’t just leave them here.” His voice cracked. He had finally run out of ideas.

  “Why not?” said Reuben Faro. In his voice Bouthain heard a shrugging of shoulders, a spread of hands upturned to indicate his vast indifference to their fate. Of course he and Mañalac were already dead to Faro. If he’d seen through their ruse, leaving Sabine and Julien in the middle of this wilderness would be a fitting punishment for their crime. Either way, they’d die here soon enough, unable to move towards food or water, no one to care for them as they came out of their drug-induced stupor. Faro could pretend to find their bodies later and denounce them, posthumously, as traitors.

  Mañalac darted forward suddenly, turning and running for cover behind the ambulance. A shot rang out from the distance and Mañalac dropped onto his hands and knees, blood trickling from his neck onto the ground. Before Bouthain could realize what had happened, the guards were swarming over Mañalac’s body, lifting it up and taking it back to their vehicles.

  By instinct Bouthain began to walk, moving quickly, leading Faro away from the ambulance. There was no time to waste: nearly eight hours had passed since they’d left Shifana, and Sabine and Julien could wake at any moment. His own fate meant little now. Bouthain was a son of Green City; he knew what was going to happen to him as surely as he knew his own name. The Leaders had always made it clear how they dealt with disobedience: quickly, brutally, and without hesitation. So what if Faro was saving him for an underground cell in the Agency? Bouthain was not afraid; he had a pill in his pocket. He could swallow it at any time and put an end to all his struggles. As he walked away with Reuben Faro, there was nothing happening inside him, only a growing sense of calm, as if he were moving in a dream.

  “Where do you think you’re going, Bouthain?” shouted Reuben Faro.

  Sabine

  My body is loose and amorphous. I have no sense of where I begin or end; I’m as pliant as seaweed floating in a gentle current. But something is touching me, stroking my neck. I’m tingling where the sensation moves, left and right, up and down. It’s ticklish. I want to giggle, yet I can’t make a sound.

  “Sabine? Are you awake?”

  The voicwhe comes from far away, as if I’m underwater and someone’s calling me back to the surface. I can see ripples, spreading out in circles from where each syllable has dropped into the darkness. Then the words sink down to the bottom where I am, drifting, drifting …

  “She’s blue …”

  “It’s been … six hours … crematorium … quarantine …”

  Someone’s fingers are digging into my throat. Someone is breathing into my face. It’s a man’s scent. Cigarettes and cologne.

  The fingers lift from my throat. The words that come next are clearer, spoke in a soft whisper: “You were beautiful.”

  I sense where I am a split second before my mind perceives it, just long enough to send a current of adrenaline into every inch of my skin, electrifying every nerve and cell. The covering over my face has been torn apart. The light against my eyelids is a warm red glow, after all these hours of being so tightly enclosed in the dark. My eyes won’t open.

  There’s a sigh, and then a moment later, a little beep.

  I can only tell he’s receded by the lessening of an invisible pressure near me, like clouds lifting after heavy rain. Space has opened up around me, but still I dare not peek into it, in case he’s still close and looking at me. Sensation returns to me, little by little, as I hear a shifting around and shuffling footsteps: the sound of someone, or two people, maneuvering themselves out.

  I lie completely still, unsure if I’m still being watched. The voices that ensue are muffled but in a different way now: beyond a physical barrier, not a psychic one. Have they moved further away? They’re not fighting or arguing, but they sound tense and annoyed. Only now do I become aware that my back is drenched in sweat and that there’s an intense itching in my hands and feet.

  The itching intensifies into a burning as I hear a popping sound, a metallic crack I’ve never heard before. There are frenzied footsteps falling, lots of them, and barked commands to move, move, move. Then a loud, hoarse shout:

  “Where do you think you’re going, Boutha
in?”

  I start to tremble. I force myself to hold still until I can hear the sound of engines starting. I hang on until the vehicles have pulled away and everything has become quiet again, except for the soft whimpering that comes from somewhere deep and low inside me. My throat’s opened up enough to let sound out; does that mean Bouthain’s drug is wearing off now? Is it safe enough to get up from this position?

  I use my hands to pull my legs over the side of the pod. When I try to stand in the narrow confines of the ambulance, I tumble over. I push back up to a low crouch, shivering, and reach out to the compact shelves lining the ambulance walls stacked with medications and bandages. My scrabbling fingers find a packet of cooling gel for burns: I tear it open and pour it all over my face and neck. Only when the searing sensation under my skin has calmed down do I realize that the ambulance isn’t moving anymore.

  “Dr. Bouthain? Mañalac?” I call out. My voice quavers. There’s no answer. A glance at their empty seats in the front of the ambulance confirms my fears. Julien and I are alone.

  I drag myself over to Julien. He’s lying motionless in his pod, face slack, skin a strange, other-worldly tint of blue. I try to shake him awake, but he’s unresponsive.

  The back doors of the ambulance are hanging open, letting in gentle light and a cool, sweet breeze filled with the clean scent of mountain air and the dry, fine dust of a wadi somewhere in a valley. The gray and brown cliffs in the near distance tell me that we’re in one of the rocky passes on the way to the border. I don’t know which one; I’ve never left Green City before today. When I look beyond the edge of the road, I see a long drop to what I recognize from screen images: a dry creek bed below.

  I ease myself out of the ambulance. There are footprints on the ground, a lot of them. Where are Bouthain and Mañalac: what’s happened to them? How could they abandon us here? Maybe the engine stalled and they went to look for help. But wouldn’t one of them stay behind to watch over us? There’s nobody around us now, not even their ghosts.

  I look down and shudder when I see drops of blood in the dust, and a trail of more blood leading a few feet away. Something terrible has happened. There’s no other explanation for their disappearance. There’s nobody else here, except for the mountains and the sky and the clouds ringing the tops of the mountains.

  I press my forehead against the door, letting its coolness soothe the aching in my head. I need time to resurface, to make sense of everything. My thoughts are skittering around like marbles in my head. And the fear is still there, even though I know I’m fully awake.

  When Bouthain injected me with the drug, I kept waiting for the dying to begin, as if it was an event that would somehow announce itself to me, with darkness or light, heaviness or a feeling of becoming lighter than air. I kept guessing what death would look like. Would death be ugly like Reuben Faro? Or kind and benevolent, like Bouthain? Or would my mind conjure up my mother’s lovely face up for me as my brain began to go out in phases?

  I barely remember lying in the pod, cool and dark, the case lined with a soft, downy material that moved and whispered all around me, as if I were floating on water. I was safely hidden away, a fetus nestling in the womb, my twin Julien in the pod next to me. With Bouthain and Mañalac in charge, there was nothing more to need, to strive for, to desire.

  Then I sank into those hours of death-not-death, and the howling wind, shaking and shifting us around as we lay dead to the world. I was aware of snippets of muffled conversation, voices I couldn’t quite recognize. But it was nothing like sleep.

  I look at Julien’s still face, wondering if was easier for him to surrender to Bouthain’s drug? Or could he actually be dead, the result of too much of the drug?

  Sabine, are you awake? It’s a refrain that won’t leave my mind now. That deep growl that spoke to me in my stupor has embedded itself in my brain.

  Out here, I’m the only woman left in the world.

  When I’ve regained some of the strength in my arms and legs, I lean on the back door of the ambulance to close it. It’s not likely that anyone will pass us by on this deserted patch of road, but I don’t want them to see the pods with one of the lids lifted open. The buzzing in my head grows with each step and my legs groan and complain as if every blood vessel in them has burst, but at least I’m out of the prison of the pod. The cocoon couldn’t shield me from what I have to face now.

  I walk around the ambulance, examining it in its entirety, a sleek yellow bullet checkered with green and black squares and the logo of Shifana Hospital. How long will it be before an air patrol drone spots us and sends an Agency car to check: before or after we die of dehydration and starvation? We didn’t take any food or water with us, we were in too much of a hurry to leave, and we were hoping to be across the border today, even with the sandstorm.

  The billowing orange cloud hangs over the skyline of the City, the sandstorm still relentlessly battering the streets and buildings of the place I’ve always called my home. But from this distance—a hundred miles, at least—it’s a phenomenon I’m observing on a distant planet through a powerful telescope. I can’t believe we actually drove through that. I’m glad I was unconscious for most of it.

  It’s actually better to be in the Panah when there’s a sandstorm of such magnitude. Sometimes I see the start of it when I’m coming back from a Client, the dust blowing in low clouds that I’d mistake for mist or fog if I didn’t hear the eerie hissing as it scratches against the roads. When we’re safely back home, we cluster together in frightened twos and threes, listening as the wind moans overhead and the warehouse creaks and complains like an old ship forced against an ocean gale it can’t withstand. We always expect to emerge from the Panah and see that the warehouse has been blown away, but somehow, it’s still standing, all but buried in dust and debris.

  My mother was always terrified of the sandstorms but my father would laugh them off with a bravado that thrilled me when I was small. “Come on, Sabine, let’s go chase it!” he’d exclaim, as soon as news came through that a sandstorm was gathering at the edge of Green City. My mother would scream at him that he was mad, but I’d already be at his side, running for the car. We’d get in and rush towards the outer suburbs to watch the storm approach.

  We’d stop at the side of the road and get out of the car, bandanas tied around our faces. I couldn’t believe anything could be that big. The sandstorm was bigger than a building, than an airplane, than an entire shopping mall. It seemed to have no beginning and no end, it seemed to have always existed. A towering yellow mass of boiling sand and dust, turning in on itself over and over again, heavy with its own momentum and orbit. The storm stretched from one end of the horizon to the other, and went on as far as the eye could see. And the deafening noise: the hooves of a thousand angry horses striking the ground at the same time.

  The winds preceding its arrival rose and fell in pitch, whipping our clothes around our bodies and nearly choking us with dust. Still, we were rooted to the ground; we’d stand there and hold hands, fascinated by its fury, bigger and more overwhelming than any human force. We’d turn around and rush home just in time before the roads closed and the curfew alarms sounded, exhilarated by our daring, ignoring my mother’s angry shouts when we returned.

  As I examine the bleak landscape and the road Julien and I have already traveled, I strain to feel some of that old exhilaration, that distant feeling that nothing could touch me as long as I was holding my father’s hand. A slim stretch of road disappears around a blind curve a hundred yards away—the path we’ve yet to take. How far are we from the border? Or are we hopelessly lost? I tighten my grip on the ambulance’s door. I call out again for Bouthain and for Mañalac. I know something has happened to them, and I have no other choice. “I’m going to get us out of here, Julien,” I say out loud.

  My hand slowly pulls open the door wide enough for me to get inside. The seat is high; I have to climb up to get int
o it. I pull myself up and awkwardly heft myself into the cab, hips first, then one foot, then the other. Leaning over, I pull the passenger side’s door closed. The jerking wrenches the incision on my stomach, but the pain’s overshadowed by a mixture of nervousness and daring at what I’m about to do.

  I close my own door, then stare down at the controls, wondering which switch turns the engine on. I’ve never driven a car before; I’ve always been driven from the Panah to Clients’ houses, floating inside my head on a cloud of fatigue and relief that the night’s over and I can be taken home in peace and solitude. How hard can it be, though? Even cars drive themselves. I reach out and press a button. A loud horn sounds, making me jump in my seat. That isn’t right.

  Are you awake, Sabine? Again the words, but the voice sounds different, an older echo this time.

  Shut up, I tell myself. I won’t be distracted by shadows now. I press every button on the dashboard in front of me, wave my hands in front of panels, look frantically above and below for pedals or a stick, anything that might give me control of the ambulance.

  A closer examination of the steering wheel reveals what I’m looking for: grooves in the back of the wheel that I can fit my fingers into, one for the accelerator and the other for the brake. At last the ambulance wakes up, its engines coughing and spitting, then roaring into life. I stare, astonished, at the panels lighting up; a raw, raucous laugh escapes my lips.

  The control buttons are very sensitive to my touch: the slightest pressure makes the ambulance lurch out of its tracks and move forward with a jolt, or stop so suddenly that I’m thrown forward in my seat, nearly banging my head on the wheel. Julien’s pod slides back and forth noisily behind me. “Sorry, sorry,” I call out, even though I presume he can’t hear me.