Occupy Me

by Tricia Sullivan

  Marquita was a small, economical person who could command any given room. She had glided her electric body over mine like a sea creature, her fingers holding me open so that her tongue could lick me into other realms. She had melted and consumed me, and when my thighs clenched and my legs wrapped around her in my extremity, she laughed and bit the insides of my thighs and I thrashed her off the bed. I’d rubbed her whole body with shea butter. I found the limits of her by sound and weight. Her moisture had soaked into my skin by morning, and I knew her cells and the clacking of the beads in her hair. I found one of her pubic hairs in my teeth and I swallowed it. I’d missed her so.

  My heart sounded like a gong this morning. It needed work to do, and so did I. But I’d been kicked out of the Resistance. If I pushed into the immovable bulk of the world, where would I go now? At Dubowski’s, equipped with Akele’s training advice, I’d pushed against the base of the crane. Every night I pushed. I pulled against the jaws of the crusher. I ripped at the wheels of the biggest truck in the lot, committing ligaments and tendons and all the electricity of my body.

  That’s when I started getting glimpses of HD. The spaces inside things parted for me like a curtain. This happened for milliseconds at first, in the extremity of my exertion. Then I learned to identify the state and make it last longer than my muscles could sustain the effort, so that there was an afterglow of this feeling of being open to something that had no name – maybe it was beyond naming. The opening went down and down and out and out, higher-dimensional space branching like the inverse of twigs or dendrites. Even after I stopped pushing I floated there with every sense standing upright.

  There was a presence in this emptiness, a sense of habitation, of immanence or intelligence. I felt like I had my fingertips to the silvery snail trail left behind by something I’d never seen.

  I was listening for probability waves, searching frequencies for a signal. A trace of what had made this invisible realm. It was like a distant scent of home.

  After a few days I came to anticipate the opening of HD, so that my sensory modules started upcoding even before the day was done. At the end of the shift I would stand behind the warehouse or under the shadow of the car-crusher and wait for the yard to be closed up. One night the crane operator was working late. He’d fallen behind and had to transfer a pile of wreckage closer to the crusher to be ready first thing in the morning. He’d been told off twice by his supervisor. Everyone else went home. The operator kept working. He kept making mistakes. He swung a taxi too hard on the end of his hook and it crashed into the side of a big metal receptacle with a gong that sizzled in my occipital bones and down to my heels.

  At last he was done. I was desperate by now. I had begun to yearn for the dissolution I felt when I was straining against the immovable. I craved it.

  The operator climbed down from the cab. He took a swig of an energy drink and blotted his forehead with the sleeve of his T-shirt. It was an awkward gesture, and it seemed to trigger a release of emotion. I felt his knees weaken. A part of him just gave up. He sagged against the base of the crane. Back then I didn’t know how to put together the reasons for his feelings, the ways in which his life was falling apart; I just felt the effects like ripples rolling over him and over me at once. His jaw worked.

  I pressed the heels of my hands against one another. Pressed myself against myself, and watched him. I sensed the angles of his bones and I felt the ground beneath him, holding him in place, and I felt the aching in his gums that came from weariness because he hadn’t been sleeping. I wanted to help him. I pressed harder.

  The act of pushing seemed to activate something in me. In between the electrical signals of the man’s nervous system I found a constellation of apertures – thousands of them. I inserted my consciousness in between these pulses like a drummer inserts a syncopated beat, like a swimmer reaches down a toe to feel the bottom. There was no bottom. In between the beats of his electrical activity there was a great stillness, there was a long, lightless ocean, and it was exerting a faint but perceptible force on me. I could fall so easily.

  ‘Pearl!’ Akele was standing on tiptoe, craning his neck to get up into my line of vision. ‘Pearl, come back!’

  I took a step away from him and steadied myself. The otherness faded, or maybe I should say it receded, as though all of the extra sensations and thoughts suddenly scurried to hide like electrons hiding behind one another to escape the Coulomb force.

  I was aware that tears were streaming down my face and my breasts were bouncing up and down because my diaphragm was in spasm and I was a little lightheaded.

  ‘My friend, what has happened?’

  He took my arm and led me away, out of sight of the crane operator.

  ‘Turn off the flashlight,’ I said. When he hesitated I said, ‘It’s easier for me if I can’t see you.’

  He switched it off and now the lumps and curves of recyclables took on tones of grey and violet and blue in the darkness, and the sound of the maple trees across the fence became sharper and full of the words that trees speak to the air, and I smelled the damp underside of a stack of wooden pallets that had been left out in the rain. I could feel Akele breathing.

  ‘I have a problem,’ I said. ‘I don’t know which parts are me and which parts are my environment and which parts are . . . other beings.’

  There was a silence. He coughed. Then another silence.

  ‘I saw this on daytime TV,’ he said in a stiff, serious voice. ‘Boundary issues, they call it. A common problem. What you must do is set limits. This is what I understand, anyway. You can’t just give yourself away, Pearl.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘People will use you.’

  I laughed. ‘Use me? What, like using a thunderstorm or using a mountain?’

  He shrugged. ‘Don’t put it past them. It’s the way of the world.’

  * * *

  In Paris I realised that Akele had been right. The hijacker had used me, but I had scraped together a little bit of identity. A job. A girlfriend. These were my efforts to make peace with my situation. I thought I belonged with the Resistance. I can’t say I felt fulfilled serving coffee to transatlantic passengers – but it had given my existence some kind of meaning. Now I’d come so close to recovering the stolen component, maybe even finding my way back to wherever I came from and, instead of helping me, Filippe was throwing me out.

  I felt like a tool.

  Just then Marquita farted and woke herself up.

  ‘Wasn’t me!’ she declared, propping herself on her elbows and looking around, uncannily alert. There’s never any slope between Marquita’s levels of consciousness. She’s discontinuous. ‘What’s for breakfast?’

  I poured her juice from the room-service tray. We hadn’t talked last night. There would have been no point. Sometimes the body has more to say than the mind; but now I had to pull myself together. Something was going to happen now.

  I observed her swallow the juice, her foot already jigging with the energy she can’t seem to keep down. She wasn’t looking at me.

  ‘Does Filippe know you’re here?’

  She shook her head.

  ‘Any mango?’ Tsubota moved at the sound of her voice. I watched him trying to find his way down from the top of the heater.

  I brought the tray over and let her choose what she wanted. She ate with precision and speed. She didn’t linger. She would walk away from me; I could see it now. Too efficient to do anything else. Filippe must have rubbed off on her.

  ‘The Resistance didn’t predict anything that happened on that plane,’ she said, spearing chunks of mango on her fork. ‘I don’t know why your shift was changed, but it was and now the whole trajectory of the future has been altered. It’s like a hole in causality opened and everything we’re working to build is starting to unravel.’

  ‘The briefcase is . . . it’s a thing that used to be my component. It’s supposed to be a part of me. It is me. And he stole it.’

  She put down her
fork. ‘It’s a briefcase, Pearl. What do you mean, it used to be your component?’

  I hugged myself.

  ‘You wouldn’t understand. It was . . . like my bone marrow, or my lymph. That briefcase isn’t just a briefcase.’

  ‘So I gather.’ She leaned back in her chair, sighing. Her eyes flicked from point to point on the cityscape outside the window as she thought. ‘Look, Pearl. Filippe is scared. No one knows what you are or where you came from. He feels like something is coming up on him from behind. Nobody likes that feeling.’

  I snorted and stood rocking on my two feet.

  ‘He should have talked to me straight, then.’

  Marquita waved her hand in the air like she wanted to erase something.

  ‘I’m not getting in the middle,’ she said. ‘I’ll tell you what I know. I won’t tell him I saw you. What else can I do?’

  Someone had hardlined a coral reef on Marquita’s toenails in exquisite detail. The effect was holographic, and when you looked at her toes it was as though you were seeing through a window into the undersea, and the fish were swimming. I kept glancing away and then looking back quickly, trying to catch the algorithm behind the trick; but I couldn’t. It was very convincing.

  ‘You talked me into the job. You really didn’t know this would happen?’

  She laughed. ‘I talked you into the job because I thought you would be happier up in the sky than on the ground. When I met you, you seemed so lost. I wanted to help you.’

  She poured coffee. I said:

  ‘Do you think I could be one of those women who love too much?’

  ‘Not from where I’m sitting,’ Marquita stroked my calf with her holographic toes.

  ‘Seriously. I fall in love with you all. Random people. I just look at them and I want to get all up inside them, I want to go with them and be them only more somehow, I want to . . . I don’t know what it is, like provide some kind of enhancement. Tell me honestly. Is that eww? Should I be thinking about the ethics of this?’

  ‘Love is attachment. That’s essential for the survival of the species. Women who love too much? What the fuck is that? The whole idea implies that love is a pathology. So now women are devalued because we can attach deeply.’

  ‘I still wonder if I’m violating boundaries by letting myself reach into people like I do.’

  ‘Maybe it’s not love at all,’ Marquita said. ‘Maybe you’re training your mirror neurons. Learning the species by empathy.’

  ‘Then why do I feel so . . . hooked?’ I almost added, ‘I find it hard to say goodbye.’ But I caught myself.

  Marquita gathered up her braids and began to wrap them up in a cloth.

  ‘You still haven’t figured out your mission.’

  ‘I’m waiting for you to find my file.’

  ‘I think you’re going to have to write your own file, baby,’ Marquita laughed. ‘According to the airline’s statement, you and Kisi Sorle were both blown off the plane when a ceiling panel came off. They made an emergency landing at Reykjavik,’ she said. ‘The airline’s being investigated for its maintenance record.’

  ‘The passengers saw me.’

  ‘The passengers were oxygen-deprived. Besides, everybody’s focused on the missing billionaire and the fact that the man who shot his daughter got blown off a plane before the authorities could catch him. There’s way too much going on for anyone to worry about you.’

  ‘So the Resistance isn’t staging some sort of cover-up?’

  She looked uncomfortable.

  ‘Not in the sense you mean, no. We don’t coerce anyone to do anything. You know that. The Resistance is about all of us working in small ways for a better future.’

  ‘You sound like a propaganda movie.’

  She gave a sea captain’s belly laugh. ‘It’s very rare for people to be aware of what they’re a part of. The Resistance just gives little nudges.’

  ‘And the technology?’

  ‘I already told you I don’t understand it. I think it comes from the future or something. Here, I want you to look at this.’

  And she showed me Dr Sorle’s file. She spread it all around the room; the Resistance has a technological edge over its contemporaries. There was his life story. His education. His family connections. His spending profile, online activity, political record, neurological patterns, DNA . . . everything you could think of, except—

  ‘Do you have his waveform signature?’

  She gave me a funny look and sucked her teeth. I realised I’d overreached the technology available to the Resistance. Damn.

  ‘So what can you tell me about the briefcase?’

  Her mood headed south. She bit off each word as if it pained her.

  ‘It’s. A. Problem.’

  ‘You’re telling me. What was that animal?’

  ‘You would know that better than I would, Pearl. You saw it. What would you say it was?’

  I shrugged. ‘Looked likes one of those quetzl things from the mid-Cretaceous. Really big specimen. Question is, where did it come from? The briefcase must be folded into HD. That’s the only way it could open up like that.’

  Every time I said ‘HD’ there was a flicker from her. I don’t think she quite believed in higher dimensions. It was like Akele walking around the back of the refrigerator to see if there was a hole in it, like a magician’s prop. I let it go.

  Marquita got up and opened the bathroom door. She crooked her finger to me. Inside was a big, kidney-shaped sunken tub. She bent over and fixed the plug in place, then started filling it.

  ‘Take out your wings,’ she said.

  ‘Scuse me?’

  ‘You heard me. You said there was oil. You had to fold them to stop them burning. So let’s see them now.’

  I was afraid. Afraid of the pain if I let them out. Afraid the oil had ruined them. Afraid of something else, something undeclared, masked. The look on Marquita’s face was sharp, wary. She wasn’t afraid, exactly. But she was something. Eager? Hungry.

  That was it. She was hungry.

  I stood looking at myself in the bathroom mirror and saw what Marquita saw: a fifty-something woman of indeterminate not-European ancestry, her denuded head wrapped in an orange cloth, her weighty breasts moving as slow pendula even in the tightest exercise bra. Shoulders like a linebacker. Traps so steep they looked like one of those road signs that warn trucks to use a low gear. Legs bowed and springy, feet large and high-arched. A nice thick layer of subcutaneous fat: no chance of this one passing as a ripped-up bodybuilder. She was packing power.

  Marquita looked at me with open adoration, but I always look at myself with surprise. There’s so much I haven’t figured out yet, and most of it is myself.

  I didn’t know what else to do, so I unfolded my wings.

  They filled the whole room. My feathers, normally a ménage of black and grey and dark brown and bronze, were now uniformly sludge-coloured. The oil had soaked right through them.

  Marquita let out out a hiss of breath.

  ‘Lay them in the tub one at a time. No, you get in.’

  ‘It’s not big enough,’ I said. They were curled as tightly as I could curl them and still they were painting the wallpaper with oil. There was a strong smell of it.

  ‘We’ll get this done, if we have to do one feather at a time,’ Marquita said grimly, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. She picked up a bucket and sponge. ‘Come here.’

  Oil dripped on the floor. Marquita scraped some up and put it in a black vial with a bar code.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘I’m going to send it to the TEM at Edinburgh,’ she said. ‘They can look at the molecular structure. I’m curious.’

  ‘Why Edinburgh?’

  ‘Because that’s where you’re going after we leave here.’

  ‘It is?’

  ‘That’s where Dr Sorle was last headed. He was going to meet Liam Forbes, who is a digital finance maven heavily involved with Stevens ever since Stevens left Pace and put out his
own shingle at IIF. You didn’t hear it from me.’

  ‘How do you know that?’

  ‘His phone records.’

  ‘Yes, Marquita, but how do you know that?’

  ‘Same as ever. Resistance.’

  ‘So, you’re not giving this oil to Filippe.’

  Marquita has a poker face. It even works on me. She just stared at me, daring me to doubt her.

  I sighed. Then I reached out and pulled out a pin feather. I gave it to her. She looked surprised.

  ‘Go ahead,’ I told her. ‘Tell Filippe to knock himself out. When you figure out what I am, be sure and let me know.’

  She held the feather up to the brightly-lit shaving mirror and squinted.

  ‘It’s soaked right in. We really need to get this stuff off of you. It’s not going to do you any good.’

  ‘Just pretend I’m a seagull in an oil spill,’ I said. ‘But it’s going to take you all day.’

  ‘Well, I can’t really run you through a car wash, can I?’

  The concentration on her face as she worked. There’s a magic about Marquita. She’s fierce and focused. The flesh on her brow lies in little waves.

  ‘Keratin is used a lot in nanotech now,’ she informs me. ‘They make plastic with it. The structure of a feather is complex and extremely durable.’

  I laughed. ‘Is it now, Wikipedia?’

  ‘A feather would be a very good storage device,’ she told me.

  I laughed again.

  ‘Are you trying to find out my secrets?’

  ‘I’m just saying. Your wings are for more than flying. We know that, even if we don’t know how they work.’