Ambiguity Machines

by Vandana Singh

  She had left him with an unsettled feeling that was new to him. Perhaps that feeling was the source of his discomfort about working at the slaughterhouse. He couldn’t explain it to himself, except that he didn’t like changes, and the slaughterhouse was a big change. He did like eating meat, though; after the tasteless cubes of insta-meal, the spiced-up-old-leather flavor of the dubious rubbish that street vendors sold, it would be sheer joy to sink his teeth into the savory, juicy chunks of meat swimming in rich broth. Not like the dreamvid with the bison, which left him with a sweet, yearning hunger. No, this would be real.

  He had only had meat twice before in his life. As a seven-year-old, he had fallen ill with some debilitating sickness, knowing he was dying, when his mother brought him a stew of something indescribably satisfying. “What is it?” he had asked weakly when he was done, but his mother had turned her face away and not answered. His grandmother had already begun to retreat into her private world then, but an awareness had come into her eyes for a moment: “I wanted to lick the bowl,” she said petulantly to her daughter. “You never let me.” It was his sister who told him the new food was meat, and whispered fiercely: “Don’t ever ask her about it!” He had understood then that it was something for which his mother had paid a price. Perhaps it was that knowledge that had given him the will to survive: that there was a world beyond his knowing, and there were things to live for. Perhaps it was the stories his mother had told him; my dreamer-boy, she called him, because of his insatiable appetite for stories. Growing up, he was still like that: a dreamer, never quite here in this hell-hole, this Patal.

  The woman had come into his life without warning. He had been lounging at the door-hole of Langra’s shop when he had seen her. A Citizen! Not on a Net show, but for real, in the flesh, up high in one of the tower windows. The windows of Upside were tilted up, turned away from the grime and squalor of Patal, and in any case they were one-way. So in the ordinary course of things Jhingur wouldn’t have seen the woman, but for the fact that she had opened the window and was peering down. Until that moment Jhingur had never known that the window could snap open, like an eyelid. He watched the woman stretching her thin body, raising her head in as though in supplication to the sun, and a feeling like an electric shock went through him. There was something in the language of her body—a yearning—that he thought he understood.

  He leaned out from the door of the shop to look at her. The shop was suspended from the underside of the Narak fly-over. Above his head the trains hummed and swayed, making a low roar that filled his ears and made his head ache gently. The Narak fly-over was the oldest and lowest-level road-bridge—above it were two roadways that carried sleekers—sometimes you could catch the glint of sunlight on the polished metal as the sleekers swooshed by like beings from another world. Jhingur had been stuck in Langra’s shop for more than a day because there was a feud going on in the peace zone in Patal, with lots of fighting and killing, and it wasn’t safe to go home. He found himself staring up, above the hell that was his home, imagining a world far removed from his. And there she was.

  “Look!” he said to Langra, pointing. Langra looked and shrugged.

  “One of the Citizens gone crazy,” he said. “Some of them do that. Open windows, I mean. Curiosity, you know. To see what’s outside the illusioneering.”

  “You mean they don’t see . . .,” Jhingur said to Langra, sweeping his arm across the grimy glory of Patal.

  “They do, if they want, from the sleekers,” Langra said. “And they know a little from the Net shows, you know, like Reality Deep Down. But Patal is not what they want to see when they look out of their windows.”

  Jhingur regretted showing Langra the woman. There was something unpleasant in the way Langra looked at her, with his tongue hanging out, as she twisted and stretched, pale against the dark mouth of the window. When she appeared again he didn’t tell Langra. Anyway Langra liked to be in the back of the shop, communing with the Net, while Jhingur dealt with customers. And now with the fighting there were no customers, so all Jhingur did was to sprawl in the front and look up.

  When she came back to the window it occurred to him suddenly to signal to her, to make her aware of his presence. With trembling hands he found a discarded dreamvid cover amid the rubbish in the shop, and a flashlight. He did not know any signaling languages but he tilted up the shiny cover and pointed the flashlight at it.

  She paused in her stretching and swaying. She leaned down. He imagined what she would see: the darkness between the great span of the roadways, wisps of smoke, the murky light of fires, perhaps the dark hole of Langra’s shop suspended from the lowest bridge, and in that darkness a light, blinking.

  It was beyond any hope he had that she would signal back. She disappeared for a moment and returned with something in her hands. Heart in his mouth, Jhingur saw the flash of light. There were regular intervals between flashes, and there were long and short flashes as well so that he understood she was telling him or asking him something. But he had no way of comprehending what it was. He thought of her life up there, as he had glimpsed in Net shows, and found that he couldn’t imagine it. With fumbling hands he signaled back, hoping she would understand that he was illiterate in the language of light.

  This was his secret for three days. For three days Jhingur did little but to send messages of light across the great gulf between them, and she answered. They had no common tongue. But Jhingur felt he understood her. She was a mythic being from up there, who had looked down and seen him, acknowledged him. She wanted to talk to him. He imagined her asking questions: What is it like, down there? He asked her questions too: How does the sky look? Have you ever seen grass, or trees? He thought she might have been on the grassland, with the bison, experiencing the things he saw only in dreamvids.

  She came into his dreams. In his dreams she held his hand. Her hand was smooth and cold. He could not imagine her human. But in his dreams he had looked into her eyes and found an answer to something he could not name.

  Then, one morning, Langra called him to the back of the shop for something. When Jhingur returned to the door-hole, the woman was no longer at the window, which lay dark and open, a gaping mouth. He waited, but nothing happened for a very long time. Then he saw other silhouettes, other shapes at the window, after which it shut abruptly. Although he couldn’t hear it clang, he jumped.

  What had happened? Where had she gone? Had those other people stopped her?

  All day he stayed in the shop front, staring up at the shut window, hoping for a sight of her. She didn’t return. Dozing, he dreamed she was falling toward him like a star, or a bird.

  By the next day he understood she wasn’t coming back. He was bewildered with pain and loss, until Langra shook his shoulder and told him it was all right to go home. He remembered then that a feud had been going on all these days below him.

  Where Jhingur lived, the no-man’s land between the territories of the demon kings Johnny Walker IV and Ghatotkacha, the truce had broken and fighting had escalated out of control. Not the common-as-day quick-killings of fools who ventured out at the wrong time or carried merchandise without care, but knife fights and shoot-outs between thugs, right there in the middle of the littered streets. Blood pooled in dirt-hollows and rival clans dragged away their dead and dying. The usual residents of the peace zone stayed trembling in their hovels. Only the rat-folk came out to scavenge, loitering at the edge of battle, their bone ornaments swinging from their necks and ears.

  That night the truce was celebrated on the street near Jhingur’s swing-shack, where Johnny Walker IV and Ghatotkacha sat together over a great table groaning with food. The food had been brought by the subjects of both domains, a kind of obeisance or tribute, and even the rat-folk had contributed. The centerpiece was a great hunk of meat, roasted to perfection. Jhingur could smell unfamiliar spices, rich aromas that made him mad with hunger. He didn’t want to be hungry; he wanted to be in mourning because he had lost his love, the woman from a
nother realm who had looked down from paradise and seen him. But the noise and the smells of revelry drew him. So he perched up on an old utility pole so he could see above the crowd of onlookers, mostly riff-raff from his own area of Patal. The people below him were licking their lips at the aromas, although a man was saying: I wouldn’t eat what the rat-folk bring, you know, even if it is a special gift for the demon-kings. Did you hear that, they brought the main course!

  There was loud, raucous music and the rhythmic clash of steel as the army of rag-tag thugs from both sides performed their ritual dance of swords. Up above them the cameras of the popular Net shows, like Reality Deep Down, paused in their ceaseless roaming of the cityscape and descended like falling stars, making people roar and wave as they hovered over the revelry. Ghatotkacha and Johnny Walker IV had been on such shows before and loved the attention. They looked up and leered, and Ghatot stood up and pulled his pants down, at which everyone cheered as though there had been no war and no killing. Ghatot smiled and rearranged his clothing, waving to the crowd like a monarch. The two demon kings embraced and sat down to their meal again, grinning self-consciously at the cameras. Every once in a while one or the other would toss a piece of meat into the crowd. The onlookers would fight for the morsel, getting down on hands and knees in the dust and rot as the cameras went wild above them. Jhingur had been wondering if he should get down and join the fray when a piece of meat hit him right in the face. By sheer reflex he caught it with his free hand and stared at it in surprise. The people below him were all hunched over the ground, looking for it. He grinned and put his mouth to the hunk like a lover, chewing as slowly as he dared, hoping nobody would look up. The juices ran down his chin; he licked his lips. The taste! Oh, so this was Citizen meat! It was better than any dreamvid. He almost wept when, after three bites, it was gone.

  He still dreamed of the woman of the tower. In the new dreams she was falling from the window, a star against the darkness, falling toward him. His arms were outstretched to catch her, but at the last moment she slipped through his fingers like dust. And there were Ghatot and Johnny Walker IV at the feast, eating, inviting him to join them, leering at him with bloody jaws. Jhingur woke from these dreams sweating and distraught. The first couple of times he had to lean out of the swing shack and vomit onto the street below.

  It seemed to Jhingur that his life had been lived in a deep darkness, with occasional moments in the sun. Now, months later, the memory of the woman was a vivid longing, a dream of grass and sunlight.

  The slaughterhouse made Jhingur both hungry and uncomfortable, but the good thing about their newfound prosperity was that his mother began to sing again; it had been years since she had sung. Some of the songs he half remembered as lullabies, although she told him they were songs of longing for the Lord. Jhingur wanted to know who this Lord was, and if there were any stories about him, but his mother said that he didn’t live in Patal, that all they had here was riff-raff and demons. Where his mother had come from, before the Great Drying, was a place of verdure and beauty, and the Lord had lived there. Her singing voice was lovely and full of longing for that old country; it made Jhingur think of a Net movie he had once seen, and not understood at all—but the images: green fields, a distant river—had stayed in his head all these years. His grandmother didn’t seem to care one way or another about the slaughterhouse or the singing; she sat nodding and drooling on her mat all day long, staring through the weave of their swing-shack at the dirt and debris below.

  Everything ran like clockwork at the slaughterhouse: all the floors and counters were shiny-clean and hygienic, and the employers took good care of the employees. Apart from the weekly meat portion they got a high-protein drink in the morning and at lunchtime, although they had to bring their own lunch. The drink was fruity and pleasant and gave them all the energy to keep working, and when everybody finished work at five, they went home a cheerful, happy group.

  Only Jhingur still refused to work there. He didn’t think that people who work at a slaughterhouse should be cheerful or happy. He thought they should be grim and heroic and not talk so much, and flinch when they saw the animals being led to the guillotine. “But you like meat,” his sister said. “Yes, I do,” Jhingur said. He didn’t know how to explain what bothered him about the slaughterhouse, where the animals were both raised and processed into meat. He wanted to explain about the bison and the grasslands, but he couldn’t find the words. Being obstinate, he continued to work at Langra’s store selling pirated mind-patches and dreamvids, and viewing old view-books, and he ate his portion (a rather large one) of the weekly meat-fry in the community cookhouse.

  That is, until the day Langra told him that what he was eating was a piece of his grandmother.

  One portion of the meat was different—tough and stringy instead of succulent. Jhingur had a chunk of it in his teeth, and it was so hard to chew that he spat it out on his palm to look at it. Langra was standing next to him, eating with relish. “Yes, some of the meat is tough,” he said. “That’s because they send the old people to the slaughterhouse, you know! Have you seen your grandmother today?”

  Jhingur was indignant. “Of course I have!” he said. He knew Langra could say mean things, things that weren’t true. Maybe it came from being a guptman. But the thought was so terrible that he couldn’t eat anything anymore. Langra just laughed and punched him on the shoulder, and kept chewing and smacking his lips.

  So Jhingur, feeling sick, went and looked at the raw pieces that were waiting to be cooked. What were those things—toes? A human-sized rib? Jhingur began screaming hysterically, making people drop their plates and spill their food. In the confusion he heard his mother saying: “What are you talking about, fool? Your grandmother’s alive and fine!”

  Jhingur ran out into the night, past the night-fires and demon-smoke depots, around the rat nests, up the web-ways where the swing-shacks hung like great gourds. It seemed to him at first that indeed his grandmother was still there in the darkness of the swing-shack, drooling and nodding. Jhingur said to her: “Shall I bring you some food?” He was upset that nobody had taken food to her. But she didn’t say anything, and when he reached out to touch her arm she faded away and disappeared.

  There came his mother and sister, climbing up the rope-ladder, entering the round hole of the swing-shack, their muscular arms shiny with sweat. They didn’t seem to think anything was wrong. His mother said that the grandmother had been gone for days, hadn’t Jhingur noticed? She had been sent to a home for dependents of the employees, where she was being taken care of. In fact, Jhingur’s mother said, she had talked to her during the lunch break on the new talkline. And Jhingur was being a disgrace and a fool, not acting like the almost-grown man he was, making all this trouble in the community. This bewildered Jhingur very much, because he was sure he had tucked his grandmother into bed last night. “You’ve just been playing pretend, like you used to,” his sister said, with some scorn. “When will you grow up, Jhingur?”

  The next day there was an invitation for Jhingur to come work at the slaughterhouse. “They really could use you,” his mother said.

  “Won’t go!” he said stubbornly. He preferred, he told her, to stay on at Langra’s shop.

  His mother and sister were annoyed with him, but only mildly. After all these years they had gotten used to Jhingur’s perversities. Before she left his mother stroked his hair, saying, “My dreamer-boy!” although she said it sadly.

  At Langra’s shop there were fewer and fewer customers. Langra said it was because of the slaughterhouse and the new jobs. He said it without rancor, but his gaze went up, up the concrete wall to the towers of Upside.

  So Jhingur lay in the shop, viewed dream-vids and ate insta-meal strips. The best dream-vid of all was the one about the bisons. If he had been good at telling stories he would have told this one to his mother and sister. It would explain to them, he thought, why he felt the way he did about the slaughterhouse, even before the disappearance of his gra
ndmother. He didn’t have the words to describe what he meant, what he felt. But the story said it all.

  Long ago, the story went, there was a tribe of people in another part of the Earth who had once hunted bison, great, god-like animals. These people had lived in the city for a while and forgotten their old ways, so one day they resolved to go back to the wide place under the sky where they had once dwelt. They called upon the old men, the memory-keepers of their tribe, to instruct them in the art of the bison hunt.

  So there they went, young men and old, out in the great, unimaginable space where the bison lived. The herd was grazing, their shaggy heads lowered. The plain was as vast as the sky. The sky was low with clouds.

  The people stopped before the bison herd and their chief drew his ancestor’s hunting knife. The metal gleamed in the air. There was a roll of distant thunder, and a few raindrops pock-marked the ground. There was a moist, heady aroma of sweat and wet ground. The chief waited.

  After a while a young bull left the herd and came up to them, and bowed his head.

  The tribe’s chief thanked the bull and raised his knife in the air. But just then an old bull came raging out of the herd, snorting and pawing at the ground. The tribe members leaped back in alarm, raising their weapons, but the old bull simply pushed the young one out of the way and bowed his head in his place.

  The blade flashed in the air, and the old bull met his death for his tribe.