The Corpse Archives

by Kameron Hurley

  I climbed up beside her. “Did you burn it?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  “They aren’t going to recopy it?” I said.

  “No. This corridor must be cleaned out by the end of the year. The keeper who oversaw its maintenance is dead.”

  “Dead? What about its own history?”

  “It’s already written on one of the bodies in the individual history corridor. It will survive in that, at least.” She gazed into the hall, and I saw her look turn inward. “I want you to touch me, Anish, here, where the text would be.”

  I shivered.

  She untied the knot of her robe, let the gray material fall open. “I want you to touch me the way you touch the texts.”

  She stepped directly in front of me. She reached out and unknotted my robe. She was so close I felt the heat of her body; her breath on my skin. I gazed at the flesh of her, the smooth, brown, hideously unmarred flesh. She was uglier than I was.

  She placed her palm on my chest. I was trembling.

  “I won’t hurt you,” she said.

  “I know that,” I said.

  She pushed off her robe, and it piled around her ankles.

  I wrapped my arms around her. She pulled our bodies together. For the first time since my arrival in the archives, I found myself pressed against a body that not only responded to mine, but wanted me there against it. This was all I had dreamed of doing during the terrible loneliness of those nights when I wrapped my empty arms around myself, trying to fill them.

  We ended up on the floor that had until that day been housed by a body text, rubbing our bodies together against the same floor it had been displayed upon.

  I tried to fuck every part of her, to join with her as I had the texts, but she pushed me away from her mouth and thighs and forced me down onto my chest, against the hard, slick floor. She pressed her whole body down onto mine, wrapped her strong hands around my throat.

  “I own all the bodies here, Anish. Even you,” she said. She laughed at me, released me.

  I struggled up and tried to grab her the way I’d often been grabbed in the compounds. But she cried out in pain when I gripped her. She pushed me away with a strength I did not expect.

  “You hurt me!” she said.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and wondered how I had hurt her. This is what we had done in the compounds, all of us. The pain and fear and pleasure all went together.

  “Don’t ever hurt me again,” she said. “If you hurt me again I’ll burn you, Anish, just like the texts.”

  “I won’t hurt you,” I said. I would have promised her anything to be able to touch her.

  She hit me then, across the mouth. I gasped at the shock of it, but I desired her as I desired the beautiful bodies of my youth. She brought pain and pleasure and fear.

  “Touch me, but never hurt me,” she said. “Understand that, dumb body?”

  “What are you called?”

  She turned away from me, jumped out of the niche, and gazed back up at me with her big, dark eyes.

  “I am Chiva,” she said, “and I am to be the librarian. Your body, all of these bodies, are mine, to do with as I please. You understand that, dumb body?”

  Chiva wanted only unaltered bodies, ugly texts like me. She liked me best, she said, because I desired the texts, and she found that so revolting that I became desirable to her. We spent our days entwined among texts, and I reveled in the feel of her body against mine. For me, it was enough. My loneliness had ended, and the archives were no longer so cold and empty to me. Chiva told the overseers she was instructing me, and most of the time they did not argue with her. I learned that there were not enough overseers to look after us anymore, and the few that remained were happy to pass my training on to Chiva, even though she had no direct link to a keeper. She was as free as an empty text could be.

  Sometimes she and I simply sat in observance of texts and listened to them narrate their histories. We lay in one another’s arms as the bodies told us a truth that would no longer exist by the year’s end. Chiva often wanted me to help her when the archivists purged another text, but I refused.

  “We just have to unhook them and put them on the cart,” she said, but I left her to it and ran off down the winding corridors to find a quiet space. I did not like to watch them take the texts away.

  I remember once when we lay across the body she had first seen me with. We both curled up next to it, told it to narrate, but did not listen. Instead, we spoke together in our soft lover’s voices, heads bent forward, bodies touching, rubbing against one another.

  “We burn them down until they’re just ash,” she said, “when we remove them from here.”

  “Why do you have to talk of it?” I said. Sometimes I thought she took delight in the burning of the texts.

  “You know what we used to do with the ash, when we burned it all down? We gathered it up in big containers, and they shipped it down to the synthetics factories along the coast, and you know what they did with it?”

  “Threw it into the sea?” I said.

  She laughed. “No. They condensed it all down, mixed it with chemicals and wood char and made synthetic logs for the living compounds around the factories.”

  “Synthetic logs?” I said.

  “Yes. I heard stories, not truth, of course, just stories, that the workers out there, the keepers would let them set the logs on fire, and they would dance around them. These naked, empty texts. They would just dance!”

  I remembered the dancers. The orange flames leaping high in the air. I remembered how proud we all were of watching that flame, that one bit of making we were able to perform while the keepers owned our bodies. The smell of the black dust, the way it coated our bodies.

  “Don’t talk about burning things anymore,” I said.

  Our days were not to last, of course. Contentment never does, does it? But then, would we remember it as content if it was not bracketed with darkness?

  “I watched you always, Anish,” my keeper told me the day it died. “I watched you and wanted to be you, and when I could not be you, I wanted to unmake you. What we cannot have, we must destroy. But then, you already know that, don’t you?”

  My overseer approached me one morning after Chiva and I had fought. Chiva said that my silencing of the texts was a form of rebellion, of subversion. She said my body was not mine but hers, to direct as she pleased. I was nothing, she said, just a dumb body, an empty text.

  My overseer waited outside my door.

  “Come with me, Anish,” he said.

  I did not ask where we were going. Perhaps a part of me already expected this.

  The overseer brought me to the center of the labyrinthine archives. I knew I would not be able to find my way back unaided. He palmed open a door and stepped into a domed room. At the center of the room stood a large hexagonal structure. The air was much cooler and drier than in the archives. The overseer walked up to the structure, pressed his hand against it, and a section of the wall opened to admit us.

  We stood inside a perfect hexagon. Lining the walls were row upon row of square gray panels, each no bigger than my palm. All of them had one small light on the lower left hand side. There must have been thousands of them, all up and down the walls, all around me. They stretched upwards some twenty feet above me. Soft light illuminated the room from panels on the ceiling, panels much like the ones in the archives; only the light these ones emitted was less white, more orange. On these thousands and thousands of squares, all of the small lights were dark; all but the ones on one solid bank of squares on my right, a collection of perhaps a dozen yellow lights. I walked over to them.

  “Are these the only ones left alive?” I said.

  My overseer nodded. He went up to the wall, selected a square situated at the far left corner of the roughly circular pattern of lights, and pressed the panel. It clicked open.

  I stared inside.

  And was disappointed. All I saw was a long tube of wire connected to the shiny
black shell of the interior. The overseer unwound the wire, asked me to come closer.

  “What are you doing?” I said.

  “Adjusting you,” he said. “Your communication hardware was fitted in the birthing centers, but never activated. This keeper wants to be linked to you. I have to attune your hardware to its settings. Be still. It will not hurt.”

  It hurt.

  I tried to pull away from my overseer, but he held me tight. The tubing in my ear sent a wave of pain shooting through my ear canal and behind my eyes, and I heard a terrible hissing that filled my head.

  When my overseer released me, I fell onto the floor. I held my head in my hands and gasped.

  “So this is Anish.”

  My overseer had not spoken. I looked up at him, at the tubing he held, and glanced up at the casing of the keeper’s square.

  “Yes, that’s mine,” the voice said. Did the voice have a gender? I do not know. It simply existed. I call my keeper he because the pronoun my overseer used was male. When I think of my keeper I think of the body of the overseer - his ugly, unmarked body, the broad shoulders, flat face, narrow nose.

  “What do you want with me?” I asked.

  Laughter. The laughter of keepers is not a laughter you ever want to hear. It echoes in your head like stones down a very deep cavern, over and again until it feels that your head has been broken.

  “You are so silly, Anish. Such a lovely body, but full of silliness! Don’t you know, haven’t you guessed? Why would I bring an archivist here?”

  “You’re dying. You want me to write your history.”

  “You see? I knew all along you were not a dumb body. I would not have chosen you otherwise.”

  “But I’m not an archivist yet. I haven’t been trained to write your history on bodies, or to teach them to narrate for you.”

  “More intelligence. Perception. Such quickness. Why aren’t all bodies so? I have been watching you, Anish. I’ve seen the way you touch the texts. You have a reverence for our truth, don’t you?”

  Did I? I wondered if the keeper could read my thoughts, or if I had to say them out loud. I kept saying them out loud. The overseer remained in the room, but paid me little attention. “It will be good to record your -”

  “Do you want to know the body I’ve chosen for you to dictate upon?” the keeper said.

  I thought of Chiva. Her ugly, unblemished skin.

  “I prefer the more educated bodies,” my keeper said. “Best find one that comprehends truth and history, one that appears dull and animalian because it is concealing its thoughts from me, not blank and dull because it is empty. I experience too much emptiness in my own kind now. Too much death. You see us dying, do you not, Anish? But that will not save you from me. The absence of the future does not negate the past.”

  “Please,” I said. “Choose another text. She’s a good archivist, and she’ll be a better librarian, when she’s finished learning.” If I unmade Chiva she would never be able to touch me again. They would lock her away into some hall where the only words she spoke were truth.

  The keeper started laughing again.

  “Chiva?” he said. “You are such a silly body, Anish! You thought I wanted Chiva? Oh no, oh no.” Laughter, laughter, my head throbbing. “Haven’t you guessed, Anish? I want you to unmake yourself.”

  *

  The world the keepers created had been falling apart throughout my life, but I had not noticed it. I did not think forward, only back. That was the nature of my existence. Now, though, none of my days were spent in causal silent observance, sprawling lazily in the present while listening to the truth of the past. Now I was told stories, stories I knew could not be truth, stories I could not silence.

  The stories my keeper told me did not match what all the texts narrated and illustrated. The stories it told confused and angered me, because if the texts were not truth, what was?

  “Exiled us?” my keeper said. “Oh, pity no, that’s the old religious pull, you understand? The persecuted few? Your people consumed it well the first few centuries, and that’s why we’ve set that story down here in the archives. But that’s not true, of course. We went out on our own, thought we were wonderfully special, thought we could leave our dead bodies behind and live in the synthetic ones forever. Ha! All fools. The last of the synthetic bodies gave out half a millennia after we crashed here. All gone. No more bodies. At least we had enough time to indoctrinate and implant you.”

  The voice in my head made me nervous. I could not halt his stream of stories. I could not ask him to be quiet, so I stole back to my little room and lay down. I avoided Chiva. My head always hurt.

  “When will the sessions begin?” I asked.

  “Oh, soon enough, little Anish,” he said. A long pause. Then, “Let us see Chiva.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “I could make you.”

  “I thought you were here to unmake me.”

  “Ah! I thought we’d bred the cleverness out of you. Perhaps another day, then.”

  But in the morning my overseer waited for me again.

  “It’s time for the sessions to begin,” he said.

  I tried to protest, but my keeper grumbled, “Oh, it’s not me, Anish. It’s those ancient fools back there, spouting off about mortality. They’re so old they’ve forgotten what it’s like to have a body that’s yours. Well then, since it’s already scheduled…”

  My overseer let me into the dictation room. He shut the door. I gazed at the apparatuses on the walls – the needles, the skin grafting equipment, the row upon row of shiny surgical tools, glass containers of narcotics.

  “I can’t do this alone,” I said.

  “Oh, I think you can,” my keeper said. “I’ll not ruin you so terribly as the others. I’d like you to function as I would, if I had such a delightful young body. Now sit on that stool and listen. You’re not just here to tell my stories. The truth, as you call it, the stories I liked best, were the ones I had when I owned my own body. You’ve never seen mountains, have you? Lakes? River stones?”

  I had never heard the terms before.

  “I’m going to have your body illustrate the real truth about our kind,” my keeper said, “I want you to be a literal text. Not one of those useless globs. I want you to be able to walk and spit and fuck. After all, what is the purpose of a body but to exert one’s power over another?”

  I wondered if he spoke of my power or his own.

  I spent our first three sessions learning to draw symbols. My keeper was able to direct me through the motions; he had a limited power over my body – enough so he could assist when I misplaced a stroke of the stylus.

  Each night, he asked after Chiva.

  “Don’t you miss her terribly?” he said.

  “Yes,” I said, and thought, but you do enough talking for all of us.

  The fourth session, I began to write. I can think of no other body but mine when I remember this session, this memory of writing. The way the precise tool inscribed my already numbed flesh in a long series of puckered marks that reddened or blackened as I pressed the button that allowed the ink to flow into the wounds.

  Afterward, I always closed my eyes. When I closed my eyes I heard the words of the woman who called herself my mother. I felt her clutch at me with her claws. “You are already our history, yes?”

  No, I thought. I am nothing. I am an empty canvas being filled. I won’t be ugly any more.

  By the fifth session the markings covered my throat and shoulders. This will not be so terrible, I thought, watching the curious red tattooed welts forming on my flesh.

  I do not remember how long my keeper and I spent in the dictation room.

  One morning I awoke in my own room and my door remained locked until well past midmorning. Another overseer arrived to unlock the door; I had never seen her before.

  “What’s happened?” I asked.

  “The other overseer’s keeper died,” the overseer said. And nothing more.

&n
bsp; With the death of that keeper came yet another purging of the texts. Piles of bodies were carted out through the corridors. I watched them with a dizzy sense of horror.

  After that, I slept in the dictation room.

  Finally, the day came when I stepped out of our dictation session, the one that I know now was our last, and Chiva stood in wait for me. When she saw me, her eyes widened.

  “It’s true,” she said.

  “It must be,” I said.

  “You don’t look like you,” she said.

  The markings now covered my torso all the way down my right leg and up to the thigh on my left, but I had only seen the black and red marks section by section, reflected back at me from a small round magnification mirror that let me apply the tattoos with accuracy.

  “It isn’t so terrible,” I said, but as I watched her eyes move over me I felt a stab of fear. “I’m still the same,” I said. “I’m not going to be in one of those niches. I’m not -“

  “You’re just another used text,” Chiva said. “You’ve lost your history and given it to a keeper. You’re just another dead keeper’s writing.”

  “You’re wrong,” I said. “You don’t know anything about it. I’m beautiful.”

  “You’re so stupid, Anish. Have you looked at yourself? You said you were your mother’s text, our text. You’re just another one of theirs now. Go look at yourself,” she said. She turned and walked away from me, trailing after a trolley piled up with bodies.

  I heard my keeper’s laughter.

  “What did you do?” I said. I walked back into the dictation room, pushed the small mirror back into the wall, opened up the panel where the full-length mirror was. I had been too afraid to look, before.

  The body that stared back at me was never mine. I had always known it was not mine. I belonged to the keepers from birth, but it was my mother’s body I spilled from, my mother’s history I had always been. But no longer.

  “What did you make me write?” I said. “What do these symbols mean?” Another question I had not asked during dictation, a question I feared the answer to. They were unlike any marks on the other texts.

  “Words,” my keeper said. “Not pictures of things, but symbols representing the sounds of the actual spoken words, words so old I thought I’d forgotten how to form them.”