“Your husband,” he said, and I could not hear the rest of his words, only saw the images they carried within them: my husband, a slab of meat on the floor of the mill, burned by Eliza. My husband, a slab of meat on the floor of the mill, dragged away to be replaced by another body, another man, so that Eliza could continue her labors.
“You will need time to rest, of course,” the manager said. “I’m sure it is quite a shock, but these things happen.”
I nodded, dumbly, and stood there, waiting for something.
“We will be in touch, of course,” said the manager as he stepped off my stoop back onto the cobbled street.
If I would have had any sense left in me, I would have done what Ayu had done, I would have run away as fast as possible, I would have done what I had done before, a long time ago, when I’d left the first time, with my mother’s hand raised in the air above her cloud of white hair, waving behind me.
Instead, I sank down into my husband’s chair in the front room and wept. For him, for our children, wept selfishly for myself. What would I do without him? I could feel him all around me, his big body having pressed its shape into the armchair, holding me in its embrace.
Within a week, a mass of suitors arranged themselves in a queue outside my door. They knocked. I answered. One was always waiting to speak to me, big and hulking like my husband had been, a little younger in some cases, a little older in others. Used up men and men in the process of being used. They wanted me to cook, clean, and make love to them. I turned them away, all of them. “No thank you,” I said to each knock, glancing over their shoulders to see if the line of suitors had shortened. It stretched down the street and around the corner, no matter how many men I turned away.
There was a shortage of women, one of the suitors finally informed me, trying to make his case as a rational man, to explain himself as suitable for someone like me. There were many men in need of a good wife.
“I am not a good wife,” I told him. “You must go to another house of mourning,” I told him. “You must find a different wife.”
The suitors disappeared then. One by one they began to walk away from the queue they had formed, and for a while my front stoop was empty. I went back to sitting in my husband’s chair, grieving.
My memory was bad, he had told me, but he was wrong. My memory kept him walking the halls and the staircase, my memory refused to let go of him completely, as it had refused to let go each time I left. I die a little more each time you are away, he had said the first night of my return to the city. Now he was dead, I thought, there would be no more dying. Upon realizing this, I stood up from his chair.
Before I could take a step in any direction of my own choosing, though, a knock arrived at the front door, pulling me toward it. How quickly we resume routine, how quickly we do what is expected: a child cries out, we run to it; something falls in another room, we turn corners to see what has fallen; a knock lands upon a door, we answer.
Outside stood three men, all in dark suits with the gold chains of pocket watches drooping from their pockets. They wore top hats, and long waxed mustaches. They wore round spectacles in thin wire frames. I recognized them for what they were immediately: captains of industry. But what could they be doing here, I wondered, on the front stoop of a widow at a forgettable address in the Lost Neighborhood, down in Junction Hollow.
“Forgive us for intruding,” they said. “We do not mean to startle you.”
They introduced themselves, each one tipping his hat as he delivered his name: A. W., H. C., R. B. All captains’ names are initials. It is their badge of honor.
“We understand,” they said, “that you have recently lost your husband.”
I nodded, slow and stupid.
“And we understand that you have turned away all the many suitors who have come requesting your hand in marriage,” they continued.
I nodded again.
“We are here to inquire as to your plans, madam, for the future,” they said, and took their pocket watches out to check the time, to see if the future had arrived yet. “Do you mean to marry again?” they asked. “Do you plan to provide us with more children?”
I shook my head this time, and opened my mouth to ask the purpose of their visit. But before I could form one word, they tapped at my chest with their white-gloved hands.
“Now, now,” they said, slipping their watches back into their pockets. “No need for any of that.”
Then they took hold of my arms and pushed me back into my house, closing the door behind them.
Within the passing of a night I became sick with their children; within a week, the front of my housedress began to tighten; and within a month, I gave birth: three in all. One by one, their children ripped away from me and grew to the size of the children I had walked to the gates of Eliza.
I did not need to feed them. They grew from the nourishment of my tears and rages. They knew how to walk and talk instinctively, and began to make bargains with one another, trading clothes and toys and whole tracts of land.
Soon their fathers returned to claim them. “Thank you very much,” said the captains, as they presented each child with a pocket watch, a pair of white gloves, a top hat. Then they looked at me. “In return for your troubles, we have built you a library.”
They swept their arms in wide arcs to the opposite side of the street. Where once a row of houses stood shoulder to shoulder, now a three-story library parked its bulk along the sidewalk. “Where are my neighbors?” I asked. “Where are my friends?”
“We have moved them to another part of the city,” said the captains. “Do not worry. We are in the midst of building them their own library at this very moment. We do not take, you see, without giving back.”
Then they clapped their hands and curled their index fingers over and over, motioning for their top-hatted, white-gloved children to follow, checking the time on their new pocket watches as they walked toward the financial district.
A dark rumor soon began to circulate throughout the back rooms in pubs and in the common rooms of the libraries of Smoke City. The captains’ children were growing faster than their fathers could manage, it was said. The captains themselves, it was said, were having difficulties with their wives, who remained in their stone mansions on top of the mountains ringing the city, above the strata of smoke. One wife had committed suicide and another had snuck out of her mansion in the middle of the night, grew wings, and flew across the ocean to her home country, where her captain had found her many years ago sitting by a river, strumming a stringed instrument and singing a ballad of lost love. Those of us who lived below their homes above the point where the wind blew smoke away from the captains’ houses had never seen these women, but we knew they were aching with beauty.
I could see it all now, what lay behind that terrible evening, and the plans the captains’ children had been making as they’d left with their fathers, opening the backs of their pocket watches to examine the gears clicking inside, taking them out to hold up to the nonexistent light.
Indeed, the future spread out before me, a horizon appearing where the captains’ sons were building machines out of the gears of their pocket watches, and more men lumbered away from the mills every day to sit on porches and frustrate their wives, who did not know how to take care of them while they were in their presence.
A future will always reveal itself, even in places like Smoke City.
But smoke nor soot nor the teeth of gears as they turned what arms once turned, as they ground time to chafe and splinters, could not provide the future I desired. I had seen something else—a long time ago, it seemed now, or a long time to come—and though it came with the price of unshakable memory, I began the journey that would return me to it.
Through the streets I trudged to the Incline platform, where I waited for my car, wearing nothing but my worn-out housedress, my old shoes covered in mud, and the stinking feces of horses. No one looked at me. I was not unnatural.
When the car arrived, I climbed i
n. And when the car began to lift, ricketyclick, I breathed a small sigh. This time, though, as I turned to peer out the back window, my mother was not there, waving her hand in the air. Only the city. Only the city and its rooftops spread out behind me. This time, I was leaving without the cobwebs of the past clinging to me.
On the way up, a car went by in the opposite direction, carrying a woman with her man inside it. I stared at her for a moment, staring at me through her window, a frightened look on her face, before I broke our gaze to look up at the mouth of the Fourth River’s cavern, and the water spilling from it.
When the car reached the top, I exited to wander through the lantern-lit cavern, the river beside me, until the walls were bare and no lanterns lit the way any longer, and the roar of the river was in my ears and the dark of the cave filled my eyes.
At some point, I felt the chill of rising water surround me. It trickled over my toes at first, then lifted me off my feet. I began to swim upward, pulling my arms through the current, kicking my legs furiously. Up and up and up I swam, until I opened my eyes to sunlight, blue skies that hurt to look at, yellow bridges, vast hills of green, and somewhere on the other side of this city my husband in this place would be waking up to find I had left him in the middle of the night again. He would wake the children next, the children I would never give over, and together they would walk to the place where I found myself surfacing. They have come across me here before. My husband would take my hand, say, “Early riser,” and I would bring his hand to my lips to kiss it.
I gasped, taking the blue air into my lungs, the light into my eyes. The city, the city of my refuge, spread out before me, the rivers on either side of me spangled with light, a fountain spraying into the air, the towers of downtown gleaming. The smoke of that other city was gone now, the fires in that other sky were nowhere on this horizon. The smoke and the fires were in some other world, and I found that I could only weep now, selfishly grateful that it was no longer mine.
1.
Eleven-year old Samuel is sitting alone at the entrance to the Confluence Park bunkers, huddled against the hot, stinking wind, ruffling his hair even though they’ve all been forbidden to go alone to the entrance. It’s long past midnight, and the dreams have been keeping him awake again. The ruins and the storm-wracked sky outside are less frightening than the dreams—all of them taken together as a whole, or any single one of the dreams. Better he sit and stare out through the gate’s iron bars, fairly certain he can be back in his berth before Miss makes her early-morning rounds. He always feels bad whenever he breaks the rules, going against her orders, the dictates that keep them all alive, the children that she tends here in the sanctuary of the winding rat’s maze of tunnels. He feels bad, too, that he’s figured out a way to pick the padlock on the iron door that has to be opened in order to stare out the bars, and Samuel feels worst of all that he thinks often of picking that lock, too, and disobeying her first and most inviolable rule: never, ever leave the bunker alone. Still, regret and guilt are not enough to keep him in his upper berth, staring at the concrete ceiling pressing down less than a metre above his face.
Outside, the wind screams, and sickly chartreuse lightning flashes and jabs with its forked lightning fingers at the shattered, blackened ruins of the dead city of Cherry Creek, Colorado. Samuel shuts his eyes, and he tries to ignore the afterimages of the flashes swimming about behind his lids. He counts off the seconds on his fingers, counting aloud, though not daring to speak above a whisper—sixteen, seventeen, eighteen full seconds before the thunder reaches him, thunder so loud that it almost seems to rattle deep down in his bones. He divides eighteen by three, as Miss has taught them, and so he knows the strike was about six kilometres from the entrance to the tunnels.
Sam, that’s much too close, she would say. Now, you shut that door and get your butt back downstairs.
He might be so bold as to reply that at least they didn’t have to worry about the dogs and the rats during a squall. But that might be enough to earn him whatever punishment she was in the mood to mete out to someone who’d not only flagrantly broken the rules but then had the unmitigated gall to sass her.
The boy opens his eyes, blinking at the lightening ghosts swirling before them. He stares at his filthy hands a moment, vaguely remembering when he was much younger and his mother was always at him to scrub beneath his nails and behind his ears. When she saw to it he had clean clothes every day, and shoes with laces, shoes without soles worn so thin they may as well be paper. He stares at the ruins and half remembers the city that was, before the War, before men set the sky on fire and seared the world.
Miss tells them it’s best not to let one’s thoughts dwell on those days. “That time is never coming back,” she says. “We have to learn to live in this age, if we’re going to have any hope of survival.”
But all they have—their clothing, beds, dishes, schoolbooks, the dwindling medicinals and foodstuffs—all of it is scavenged remnants of the time before. He knows that. They all know that, even if no one ever says it aloud.
There’s another flash of the lightning that is not quite green and not quite yellow. But this time Samuel doesn’t close his eyes or bother counting. It’s obvious this one’s nearer than the last strike. It’s obvious it’s high time that he shut the inner door, lock it, and slip back through the tunnels to the room where the boys all sleep. Miss always looks in on them about three, and she’s ever quick to notice an empty bunk. That’s another thing from the world before: her silver pocket watch that she’s very, very careful to keep wound. She’s said that it belonged to her father who died in the Battle of New Amsterdam in those earliest months of the War. Miss is, Samuel thinks, a woman of many contradictions. She admonishes them when they talk of their old lives, yet, in certain melancholy moods, she will regale them with tales of lost wonders and conveniences, of the sun and stars and of airships, and her kindly father, a physician who went away to tend wounded soldiers and subsequently died in New Amsterdam.
Walking back to his bed as quietly as he can walk, Samuel considers those among his companions who are convinced that Miss isn’t sane. Jessamine says that, and the twins—Parthena and Hortence—and also Luther. Sometimes, when Miss has her back to them, they’ll draw circles in the air about their ears and roll their eyes and snigger. But Samuel doesn’t think she’s insane. Just very lonely and sad and scared.
We keep her alive, he thinks. Because she has all of us to tend to, she’s still alive, against her recollections. He knows of lots of folks who survived the bombardments, and then the burning of the skies and the storms that followed, and whom the feral dogs didn’t catch up with, lots of those folks did themselves in, rather than face such a shattered world. Samuel thinks it was their inescapable memories of before that killed them.
He crawls back into bed, and lies on the cool sheets and stares at the ceiling until the dreams come again. In the dreams—which he thinks of as nightmares—there’s bright sunshine, green fields, and his mother’s blonde hair like spun gold. In his dreams, there’s plenty of food and there’s laughter, and no lightning whatsoever. There is never lightning, nor is there the oily rain that sizzles when it touches anything metal. He’s never told Miss about his dreams. She wouldn’t want to hear them, and she’d only frown and make him promise not to dare mention them to the others. Not that he ever has. Not that he ever will. Samuel figures they all have their own good-bad dreams to contend with.
2.
The storm lasts for two days and two nights. Miss reads to them from the Bible, and from The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and from Mark Twain. She feeds her filthy, rawboned children the last of the tinned beef and peaches, and Samuel has begun to resign himself to the possibility that this might be the occasion on which they starve before an expedition for more provisions can be mounted.
But the storm ends, and no one starves.
Early the morning after the last peals of thunder, after a meager breakfast— one
sardine each and tea so weak that it’s hardly more than cups of steaming water—Miss calls them all to the assembly room. They know it was not originally intended as an assembly room, but as an armory. The steel cabinets with their guns, grenades, and sabers still line the walls. Only the kegs of black powder and crates of dynamite have been removed. The children line up in two neat rows, boys in front, girls behind them, and she examines them each in their turn, inspecting gaunt faces and bodies, looking closely at their shoes and garments, before choosing the three whom she will send out of the bunker in search of food and other necessaries.
Once, there were older kids to whom this duty fell, but with every passing year there were fewer and fewer of them. Every year, fewer of them survived the necessary trips outside the bunker, and, finally, there were none of them left at all. Finally, none came back. Samuel suspects a brave (or cowardly) few might have actually run away, deciding to take their chances in the wastelands that lie out beyond Cherry Creek, rather than return. However, this is only a suspicion, and he’s never spoken of it to anyone else.
The lighter sheets of rain that fall towards the end of the electrical storms are mostly only water, and after an hour or so it will have diluted most of the nitric acid. It’ll take that long to hand out the slickers and vulcanized overshoes and gloves, the airtight goggles and respirators, and for Miss to check that every rusty clasp is secure and every fraying cord has been tied as tightly as possible. Samuel imagines, as he always does, that the others are all holding their breath as she makes her choices. There have been too many instances when someone didn’t return, or when they returned dying or crippled, which is as good as dead, or worse, here in their bunker in the world after the War. Samuel also imagines he’s one of the few who ever hopes that he’ll be picked. He doesn’t know for certain, but he strongly suspects this to be the case.
If volunteers were permitted, he would always volunteer.
“Patrick Henry,” says Miss. Patrick Henry Olmstead takes one step forward and stares at the toes of his boots. His hair is either auburn or dirty blond, depending on the light, and his eyes are either hazel green or hazel brown, depending on the light. He’s two years younger than Samuel. Or, at least he thinks he might be; a lot of the younger children don’t know their ages. Patrick Henry has a keloid scar on his chin, and he’s taller than one might expect from his nine years. He’s shy, and speaks so softly that it’s often necessary to ask him to please speak up and repeat himself.
Steampunk III: Steampunk Revolution Page 41
