Nekropolis

by Maureen F. Mchugh

  The office isn’t anything like the outside of the building. Where the building is playful, the office is full of desks and information consoles. There are a dozen people at the desks. Some are talking into headsets. At least they aren’t wearing uniforms.

  A woman takes off her headset. “Hello,” she says in Moroccan. “I’m Miss Katrina.” She has on a sand-brown dress with sleeves that come to between her wrist and elbow and a skirt falls to a few inches above her ankles, but she’s not naked-looking like the women on the street.

  “I’m Hariba,” I say, “and this is Akhmim. He’s a harni .”

  She has us sit down and she takes my whole name and where I used to live. I give my aunt Zehra’s address.

  “Does the chimera belong to you?” she asks.

  I don’t know quite what she means. “Do you mean Akhmim?”

  “I’m sorry.” She smiles. “We don’t say harni . We call biological constructs “chimera.” Harni is something of an insulting name.” She has a Spanish accent, but she’s easy to understand. I don’t know why they don’t use the word “harni,” though.

  “There are more like Akhmim here?” I say.

  “Not so many like Akhmim. There aren’t many places where it’s legal to make people like that. But there are a pretty fair number of different kinds of chimera here. And there’s a little community of chimera that were made to be slaves. Do you own Akhmim?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Who owned you?” she asks Akhmim.

  He gives her Mbarek’s name and address. “Do I have to go back?”

  She shakes her head. “We don’t recognize ownership of people or chimera in Spain , or anywhere in the E.C.U. Do you want to go back? Have you been brought here against your will?”

  He shakes his head. “No, Hariba brought me, but I don’t want to go back.”

  “Are you impressed on Hariba?” she asks.

  “Yes,” he says.

  I’m tired and nervous. The questions they’re asking make me even more scared. “We love each other,” I say.

  This woman, Miss Katrina, nods her head. “All right.”

  She runs her fingers across the unfamiliar letters on the touch pad. She asks me some more questions: Do I have any family in the E.C.U.? Do I speak any languages other than Moroccan? Did I work in Morocco ? What kind of work did I do?”

  “I was a house manager,” I say. “I was jessed.”

  She stops and says, “How long since you left?”

  “About twelve hours,” Akhmim says.

  “All right, we need to get you medical help. You should have told me. Hold on.” She puts her headset back on and starts speaking in Spanish. After a moment, she says, “Do you have a headache? Feel sick?”

  “A little headache,” I say, “but I’m not jessed anymore. I ran away over a month ago.”

  She covers her mouth with one hand. “What did you do? Did you get help?”

  “Akhmim took care of me,” I say, “and then my family did. My mother found a horse doctor who gave me some patches.”

  She talks in Spanish for a moment. “We’re going to take you to the hospital anyway,” she says. “The doctor wants to assess you.”

  “Can Akhmim come?” I ask.

  “I’ll take care of Akhmim, and then I’ll bring him to see you in a few hours.”

  “Akhmim needs to go with me,” I say. “He shouldn’t be by himself.”

  “He’ll be all right,” Miss Katrina says, “and so will you. We’ll take good care of you.”

  “Are you going to take him from me?”

  “No, no,” she soothes. But I don’t believe her.

  “I should go with her,” Akhmim says. He knows how afraid I am.

  “I’m afraid you would just be in the doctor’s way.”

  I’m so tired I start to cry.

  “Let me get you a cup of tea,” Miss Katrina says. She gets up.

  I watch her walk away and think, We should run. But run where? There isn’t any Nekropolis here. I wouldn’t even be able to ask for help. “They can’t take you from me,” I say to Akhmim.

  He holds my hand. Miss Katrina brings black tea.

  “We don’t have any mint tea, I’m afraid,” she says.

  It is bitter but hot. The room is cold. I sip the tea and shiver.

  People aren’t looking at us, at least. Evidently in this office they’re used to women crying. MISS KATRINA takes a card out of her desk drawer. “This is my card,” she says. “It’s a smart card, so open it up and it’s a phone.” She shows me. “I’m your facilitator. Let me write my name in Arabic for you.” She writes MISS KATRINA in round, childish script. I can read the numbers but none of the other writing on the card, which is all in Spanish, of course.

  A man and a woman in blue come in the door. They are carrying cases. Katrina waves to them. “These are the medics,” she says. “They’ll take care of you and take you to the hospital. They don’t speak Moroccan, but they are good people and they’ll be gentle with you.” Then she talks to them in Spanish.

  The woman kneels on one knee in front of me and smiles. Carefully, she takes my hand and turns it palm up, then she shows me a strip of plastic and puts it around my wrist. She takes some sort of slate off her belt, and shows me the numbers flashing on it. I think I recognize blood pressure.

  Miss Katrina hands me a tissue and I take it in the hand the medic isn’t holding.

  Akhmim watches gravely. After a minute, he takes the tissue from my hand and wipes my face with it.

  * * *

  The hospital building is different. It’s a long complex of dun-colored stone buildings with galleried arcades between some of the buildings. The truck with the medics and me stops at wide doors. The woman holds my arm as I climb down out of the truck. The back of the truck had made me nervous-it had a kind of huge black coffin. But the man had sat in the back with me while the woman drove. We’d sat in seats that he showed me could become a bed. He had pulled a belt across my shoulder and waist gently, as if he were a father and I were a child. Then he’d pointed to me and said, “Hariba.”

  I’d nodded.

  “Gianni,” he said and pointed to himself.

  “Gianni,” I’d said.

  He’d been pleased. Then he’d checked the plastic band on my wrist again. I’d wanted to tell him that I wasn’t sick anymore, but hoped maybe the plastic strip would show him that.

  The hospital isn’t like a hospital inside. There’s a large room for a lot of people, and more of the black coffins. One is open and the inside is full of thick blue liquid. There’s a facemask hanging out of it on a long flexible tube that’s ribbed like a windpipe. There are a couple of beds, too. But we pass through that room to a hall with bedrooms off of it.

  The medics take me to one of the rooms. It’s pretty, all old-fashioned-looking with yellow stucco walls. The woman pats the bed and motions for me to sit on it, so I do, and she takes off my shoes and brings me a blanket as if she were my servant.

  The medics leave and I think I’m so tired I might go to sleep. But I can’t. After a bit, another woman with a slate comes in and smiles at me. “Hariba?” she says.

  I nod.

  “Estanza,” she says. Then she checks my wristband, the way the medics had.

  She does something on the slate she holds and a pleasant voice announces, “I am your doctor.” The slate takes her Spanish voice and repeats it for me in my own language.

  “Doctor Estanza?” I say, forgetting that she can’t understand “doctor,” but she just nods and smiles. She taps something else.

  “Are you comfortable?” the slate asks me.

  I nod.

  “Headache?”

  I answer a lot of the same questions that I answered for the medics. I’d like to be able to tell her I’m not sick, but of course she doesn’t ask me that.

  “I want to do a test,” she says through the slate. “It won’t hurt.”

  She leaves. I look around the room to see if so
mething is happening. Am I supposed to sit still? I can see the lights in the ceiling and beside the bed and there’s an image on the wall, like a window on the ocean in a place where there are palm trees. Maybe the image is some sort of screen? She would have told me if I was supposed to sit still.

  She comes back with something like a hat with a facemask and I realize she had just gone to get it, that the hat device is the test. She has me sit up and take off my veil and she sets the hat device on my head. It’s a little heavy, a little unbalanced. It has a lot of weight on top toward the front of my head, and I feel that if I lean my head forward, it might slide off. The mask comes down over my eyes and rests against my cheekbones. There is nothing to see inside, no screen or anything.

  The doctor asks me through the slate, “Can you hear me?”

  “Yes,” I say, but I’m not sure she understands me, so I nod cautiously.

  “Good,” says the slate. “Who are you jessed to?”

  “Um, my mistress is named Zoubida,” I say and I feel the hat get warm. “Oh,” I say and reach up.

  “Wait,” the slate says and I stop with my hand halfway raised. I can imagine her fingers tapping across the slate.

  I wait.

  “It is all right,” the slate says. “It will get warmer, but not much. Please describe your mistress.”

  “She’s tall and middle-aged,” I say. “She’s not very well off, not like my first household.” I don’t know what they want me to say. “I liked her. She wasn’t mean to me, and if it hadn’t been for Akhmim, I don’t think I would have left her.” Although if it hadn’t been for Akhmim, I would probably still work for Mbarek. “Um, I feel bad about leaving her because she paid a lot of money for my services.” I can’t think of what else to say. Maybe if I’d had some sleep, I would be able to think better.

  I wait.

  Finally the slate says, “Describe the best thing about the person you are jessed to.”

  “The best thing?” I say. Are they recording this? The whole test is very strange. Maybe the device is reading my thoughts? “She was very kind,” I say. “And she was very appreciative. I guess the best thing was that she was easy to please, that she didn’t expect more than a person could do.”

  I wait.

  The slate says, more quickly this time. “Describe the thing you like least about the person you are jessed to.”

  I think a minute. “She didn’t have very good taste,” I say finally. “She was disorganized and she didn’t have very good taste.” When I was jessed, it was hard to think about the mistress this way. I think maybe thinking about her this way is giving me a headache, but I’m so tired that could be the real cause.

  It’s silly to dislike someone because they have bad taste. But it was true.

  I wish I could take a nap. I wish Akhmim was here.

  “All right,” the slate says. Then I feel the doctor’s hands lifting the hat. She smiles at me.

  “Would you like some water?” she asks me through the slate.

  I nod.

  She gets me water and then she says through the slate. “Someone will take you to a room, and you will rest.”

  She leaves me. In a while a young man does come and take me to a pretty white room with two tall narrow shuttered windows. The room is small and nice. He opens the shutters and they look out on one of the connecting walks with their series of arches. The breeze comes in-it feels cooler than it should but very nice. When he leaves, I’m so tired that I cry for a while and that makes my head ache more. Then I do finally fall asleep.

  SPECIAL_IMAGE-clip_image002.jpg-REPLACE_ME

  I stay three days in the white room. Miss Katrina brings Akhmim to see me in the evening and seeing him is like going home for a moment. But she explains to me that when the horse doctor took care of me, there were things that he couldn’t really do, so he has kind of made a little cage for the problem. Eventually, she says, the cage will cause other problems, so the best thing to do is to be cured.

  Curing involves putting something else in me the way when I was jessed they numbed the roof of my mouth and injected the thing that jessed me. Then they keep me for two more days. Twice a day they bring in the device like a hat and ask me to talk about my old mistress.

  On the third day Miss Katrina comes and gets me.

  “How are you feeling?” she asks.

  I don’t think I feel much different, maybe a little stronger from the food they have been giving me, but I say that I feel very good.

  “I’ve found a place for you and Akhmim to stay,” she says.

  “Where is Akhmim?” I ask.

  “He’s at your flat.” She has a little gray bubble car and we climb in.

  “How do I pay for the hospital?” I ask.

  “Hospital care is paid for,” she says. “We have hospital care for everyone.”

  “Who pays?” I ask.

  She blinks for a moment. “Nobody,” she says. “I guess you could say that the government pays.”

  It’s obviously a very rich government.

  “Tomorrow,” she says, “you will need to come down to us and file your paperwork for asylum, then you can be granted residency status. We granted you emergency temporary status so you could be in the hospital, but we need to get that upgraded to permanent as soon as possible.”

  I nod. The little gray bubble car goes quickly around the corners and through the narrow streets of what looks like an old city, but then we climb up into the hills and the buildings get newer. It’s like going through time, up from ancient to old to shabby to foamstone, and finally we stop at a building a little like the office where Miss Katrina works, yellow with blue balconies. Some of the balconies have plants on them.

  They’re so much prettier outside than the places back home, but I don’t like the balconies. It feels like living your life in public. If they had a courtyard, a balcony would be all right. Upstairs inside the hallway is plain with a plain blue carpet on the floor. She stops at 216 and knocks on the sea-blue door and Akhmim opens it.

  Our flat is empty. The rooms are square on three sides and bow out on the outside wall. The floors are dark, deep green foamstone, polished and grooved like tile. It’s so empty. Akhmim doesn’t even really seem to live here, there’s nothing behind him but windows and air.

  I walk through the flat with them. There are four rooms-the big room, the kitchen, the bedroom, and the bathroom. It’s nicer than a death house and I think to myself that with rugs and a couple of chairs and curtains on the windows it would be nice. There are blankets on the floor in the bedroom where Akhmim has been sleeping. Our bags are there, looking small and dirty in the corner.

  It’s very foreign and bare. As if no one had ever set foot inside this place before. Miss Katrina chatters a few minutes and then leaves.

  “What have you been doing?” I ask Akhmim.

  “Waiting,” he says.

  I can imagine him waiting, too. When I was sick, he had unimaginable patience. He could just sit.

  “What do you think?” he asks.

  I sit down on the blankets-there’s no place else to sit. “It’s nice,” I say. I hadn’t thought about what it would be like to get out of the country. I had the vague idea we would find other people from Morocco . “It’s very foreign.”

  “How are you feeling?” he asks.

  I shrug. “Better.”

  He seems remote. He wasn’t distant when we were living in Mbarek’s household.

  “Miss Katrina said I have to go file some papers tomorrow to get residency.”

  He nods. “I know which bus to take.”

  “What about you, do you have to file papers?”

  “I already have my residency,” he says and shows me his smartcard with his image on it.

  “You have residency?” I ask. Somehow I never thought about it, I thought Akhmim would have residency with me or something. I remember what she said about not calling him a harni . “Does it bother you when people call you a harni ? Do you prefer chi
mera?”

  He shrugs. “Not particularly. Whatever people call me, I’m still what I am.”

  “I don’t see why it makes any difference.”

  “It’s a human thing,” he says. “Words shape your thoughts.”

  It’s a human thing. I shudder and I don’t know why.

  “Do you want to rest?” he asks. “Or we could go shopping. I still have some money, and Miss Katrina helped me get it changed into E.C.U. units.”

  “We should probably save it,” I say.

  “Miss Katrina says we will get an allowance from the government until we can get training and find work.”

  “How much?” I ask. But I realize I don’t know how much it is because I don’t know how much anything costs. Akhmim doesn’t know anyway.

  “Come on,” he says gently. “Don’t be sad. Come pick out some things for your new home.”

  * * *

  Miss Katrina calls on my little cardboard phone. “Miss Hariba,” she says, “I was talking to someone for whom I used to be facilitator, and I mentioned you. She’s Moroccan and she’s having some friends over tomorrow evening. They are all Moroccan expatriates and she asked me to invite you.”

  And so Akhmim and I go to a party.

  We go on the bus. The buses run past our flat until two in the morning, later than we’ll stay, I think. I don’t have anything to wear to a party. I brought some things from Morocco but not very much and the people in Spain are all so rich. Akhmim and I go to the store to buy something to bring the hostess. It is an astonishing place, the store. So big, and so full of so many things. There is a part of the store that is full of vegetables and fruit, and a part of the store that is full of different kinds of meat. I look at the pork because I’ve never seen pork before. It’s pale and unwholesome-looking, but while I am standing there, a woman buys some. It is so expensive. These people have so much money.

  A lot of the things in the store are in boxes or packages, sealed and bright and clean. There is an entire section of beer and, I think, wine. I stand for five minutes and seven people buy beer. I don’t have too much trouble with couscous and rice and vegetables, not even with meat and fish, but I can’t tell which boxes are soap. Nothing is in Arabic.