These Lifeless Things

by Premee Mohamed

  August 2

  Woke this morning to find the man still alive, glued to the rug with dried blood. I unstuck him and shook him awake.

  My name is... Konstantin, he said, and I thought: Good, then you can go into my diary, because your name does not start with the same letter as anyone else’s. We did not wait for the other names. No one gives them any more.

  He thanked me. I accepted his thanks. I didn’t know what else to say.

  I did not say, Stay here in this neighbourhood, with everyone else. Out loud, I said, I expect you’ll have people to get back to.

  He said, No. Not any more.

  Ah, I said.

  Rude to pry. Especially when the answers were all around us for a while, rotten and mummified, grasping each other in their last desperate moments, like the ash casts from Pompeii; so many that we stopped seeing them till they began to vanish, so many that we never could bury nor burn them, though of course, in those early months, we did try. He must remember that.

  I told him, There are a few of us, and we are getting by. If you help us, we’ll feed you.

  All right, he said. Thank you.

  But we have to rest today.

  Yes, he said. What can I do? Your leg doesn’t look good. Can I get water? Wood?

  So I sent him out an hour ago to scavenge for cans and water and whatever else, and when he was gone I heated up the needle I keep in my collar and stitched the worst parts of the claw wound shut. Unsanitary, I suppose, using that curtain thread. But I’ve got a good immune system, and there was lots of it, the thread I mean, unravelling easily from the clumsy hemming job someone did at the bottom. When M. and I first moved out, we had curtains like that, and he never knew how bad a job I had done at shortening them for the window. Things to remember, things to forget. Leg is propped stiffly in front of me now, which makes a good desk to balance this book on.

  VICTOR AND I pick things up with tweezers and put them in jars, plastiseal them in clear packets, like pills, to analyze later. There seems to be something different about this than Winnie with her bones, and me with my words. We seem like vampires or ghouls or something, while Victor seems like a real scientist, dreamy, focused, pure. I sometimes find myself resenting that he never has to deal with our moral dilemmas of consent, theft, desecration of the dead. He leans down and snips seedlings, and hands them to me to embed in the bags of clear nutrient gel. (It tastes like coconut. We’ve all sneaked a bit; it was that or die of curiosity.) “Soon, we’ll have siege trees growing back home,” I said, and he nodded, excited.

  There’s such a thing as the love of truth, I think, watching him handle the seedlings so gently, watching Winnie’s hands on her bone fragments, far more delicate than any manipulator on even the most carefully-engineered drone. But if that’s true then truth can come in many forms; as many as love.

  Victor hands me a seedling and says, “People always misunderstand ‘survival of the fittest.’ Even now. It doesn’t mean we rush over each other to the exits to survive. It means we help each other become more fit. There’s the micro-level of you, your genes, which you want to live above all others. But then there’s also the macro level. Not of you or even your family, but your species, your ecosystem.”

  I nod absently. The seeds and even nuts we pick up are sometimes disquietingly serrated, all razor-sharp edges and clear patches. Victor tells me they’re quite normal and will lend no credence to them ever ‘grabbing’ people. But his genetic analyses show that where you’d normally find ordinary elm or linden seeds or the occasional chestnut, something has ‘obviously’ modified them. “Maybe a gall,” he says, and we don’t meet each other’s eyes. “Or some other parasite. Maybe a fungus.”

  I think Darian is sabotaging my investigation. I can’t say anything. Baseless suspicions, nothing you could hang your hat on, and the others would roll their eyes at me. He got the vast majority of the funding for this trip, he usually calls the shots. He’s the reason we got a real research pod instead of a crappy trailer, he’s the one who made sure that we could charter a hover to drop us out here instead of schlepping everything in by truck and foot.

  At any rate, no matter what he’s doing, it continues. The investigation, I mean. In my off-hours I still tack around the city, mazed with wonder and terror, trying to confirm the things I find in Eva’s journal.

  The student, Polina, says you can’t hit the statues during the day with a shotgun? I’ve never seen that before. “Applied science,” I said last night during dinner, and Darian said “What?” and I flung a rock at the one near our pod. It hit, solidly, and ricocheted off the faceted bronze surface to land somewhere in the darkness. The sound was unbelievable, a deafening gong like I’d hit a churchbell. We stared at it in absolute childish horror for a moment, as if that were its cue to ‘come alive’ and attack us, but of course nothing happened.

  I found a place to hide and read the journal, the real version, while I lie and tell the others that I’m with someone else, when I can’t bear it any more. Another research team, I read on my notepad, is headed to a town about a hundred klicks away at the end of the month. I wonder if it’s the one where people fought back. But how do you tell?

  My secret place has ancient candles everywhere, imprisoned in clear glass and brass lanterns or bare on marble shelves, lighting the huge decorated room like a Renaissance painting of the annunciation. I wonder what it used to be, once. Not a church. To get in you pass through a place so small that I had to put my bag in front of me to fit through the doorway, arched black brick. Here and there marked with scarlet, as if the brick itself were not black but plain red and had once been burned. Down several uneven steps into a low room, brushing past silk scarves and gloves, lipstick displays, antique compacts, feather fans, silver filigree card holders. And three shelves of perfumes, thick glass slabs on brass fittings, then the door into the bigger room. Maybe it was a store. But what a store! I light the candles, poke out bricks for ventilation. I don’t want the others to find me in here, dead from bad air.

  There are history books, Eva. Children are still being taught. And we are the descendants of the people you rescued.

  I need to ask Winnie about the nutritional states of the bones she’s finding, I know she can do that analysis. Were they well-fed or starving? If we find some wonderfully well-fed bones, the bones of a glutton, would those be Konstantin’s bones? I wonder. I must break myself of the habit of thinking that any of these people can be identified. Only their traces are left.

  August 27

  K. works in the garden, uncomplaining. His hands look all right, don’t they? We noticed in that skirmish that Their agents, the thralls I’m convinced have been deputized to administer Their reign on Earth, had been issued official badges, horrible, insectile things with razor edges. I am quite sure they move when you’re not looking. But at any rate: you know an agent because of their bloodied handkerchiefs and raw fingertips. I suppose he could still be working with them, unofficially. What spy would blow his cover with such an obvious thing as his hands?

  He talks while he works. About revolution, about counter-revolution, about trains filled with doomed royalty. These things, he had told people again and again in those first dark weeks, never changed; you could read about it in the textbooks, write papers about it, even teach it, but until you lived it, you could not expect to truly understand. And that was why they survived.

  This man is not old enough to have their attitude—courtly but adamantine. He is some kind of scholar. But he will not talk about his past. Not unusual in and of itself; many don’t. It is a monumental kind of pain, like birth, and despite what my mother told me, unforgettable; you do not do it more than is necessary. To keep with the comparison, such a large thing as one’s comfortable, safe past in the city, fed and warm, with one’s family still alive, cannot pass through such a small orifice as the mouth.

  I think sometimes of all the things I have not told V.

  About my boys, for one. I am terrified he will r
ecognize their names and he will turn out to have attended their school or something. About M., yes; but not his death. Not even my last name, nor he his; no one does now, as K. knows. As if our families, gone, can carry those names only; as if we the living must get by with something else, as if only in death are the names truly safe. I only half-disbelieve it. They can take everything including all the blood from a body and all the spirit too, all the memories, intelligence, all the heat, all the veins, all the hair and nails; we’ve all seen it; who’s to say They cannot take a name?

  Anyway, to admit it would be to also admit that I took Mariusz’ name when we married. So I am no better than Them. That I took it out of love would make no difference. They don’t know what love is anyway.

  I hate that my leg is still sore. No infection yet. Just the tired, angry ache of ripped muscle and whatever godawful things live on the feet of those little monsters, healing. If I were twenty years younger, if I were V.’s age, I would be walking this off already.

  No one speaks of the missing children while we search, while we interrogate, while we mark the buildings. No one speaks: but we think about it all the time.

  If I asked K. about it, I wonder what he would say. But he is still too new to trust with this fragile thing that we do not, ourselves, know what to do with. He is not really a part of this neighbourhood. I’ll ask V. about him later. Maybe even P., who senses (I think) that I am not really at ease around her, but (I am quite, quite sure) does not know why.

  It grieves me to see it in her eyes, she is so hungry for love and connection, and so angry about that need within herself that she kills it every day, she stamps down on its corpse, it is buried in a cast-iron coffin at her personal crossroads. I would give her all that love so easily, if not for this one juvenile, awful thing. I hate myself for it. She can never know. Yes, I’ll talk to her too. I could give her this one thing. I give so little now.

  September 15

  We search; we still have to eat. Have to feed the grief, or else what will it eat in its hunger? We are breaking new ground now, for what we would have probably once referred to as patriotism gardens or victory gardens but now we do not even call them gardens, we just call them food; we are breaking new ground for food, a fall planting. At the outskirts of the old park near the cemetery, where several huge trees were torn down on Invasion Day, the ground has been reclaimed by weeds and concrete bits; but it’s a good location, I’ve been scouting it for a while.

  We heaped up a guard tower, and put V. on it while A. and P. and K. and I did the digging for most of the day. Things flitted in the treetops, though not for long; every now and then something would shoot out, and there would be a brief cry, and a flurry of feathers. Soft, soft grey or iridescent violet, like clouds.

  The pigeons all left, P. said, looking up, alertly, and baring her kittenish teeth at the trees. Then they were coming back.

  Were, I said.

  I hate these trees, she said.

  Me too. We couldn’t go any deeper into the park; we’d be torn apart. Things live there during the day, and walk freely in the tentacled shadows of the ancient trunks, just as the statues walk in the night.

  We’ll probably be all right here in the open, I said.

  The soil was black and safe, and familiar, and curiously uncontaminated. K. said, We have some of the best soil in the world, you know. Make a dead stick bloom.

  I hope so. There are fewer of us to be fed, but there will be more if we get the children out. Where are they, where have they been taken? Is it shameful of me to feel proud for putting seedlings in rows? I should be storming the Bastille of Monsters, dammit.

  Think of them in there.

  I can’t think of anything but! How am I supposed to stay alive, thinking like that?

  They say: You put on your own oxygen mask first, and then you tend to others. But remember when we were flying for that choir competition and the plane dropped and I snatched at the mask and put it over I.’s face, and M. just looked at me, from behind his own... you’re meant to put on your own mask first. You can’t help others unless you help yourself.

  But have I gotten too used to helping myself? I don’t know. I hate my mind sometimes; I wish I could turn it off, as in the old days.

  One worrying thing. When V. and P. switched spots on the guard tower, she lasted all of an hour before standing, calling out, garbled words, no language any of us knew. We all spun, expecting to see sentinels approaching, slithering over the fresh black soil, emerging from the trees. We were ready to fight. But no, it was just the girl, her head thrown to the sky, this unbelievable stream of noise from her mouth, trying to speak Their language, the one we hear in dreams. V. seemed glued to the spot in sheer terror. K. panicked. A. sighed, and hefted his shovel.

  You stay away from her! I shouted, and scrabbled up the heap of stones we’d built to the flat spot on top, and grabbed the girl’s leather jacket, pulling her nearly on top of me; for a second we teetered, startled, in the sunlight, gasping for air. But she stopped the noise as soon as I touched her, and I knew it was one of those... moments, just a moment, we all get them. Mostly while we sleep, when we can’t hurt ourselves. Sometimes, admittedly, during the day.

  She was shamefaced afterwards, quiet. She dug and picked rocks without complaint, her eyes and nose swollen and red, as if she was about to cry, but would not permit herself to do so. Something, perhaps her abruptly cut-off call, attracted small ugly sentries from the neighbourhood that harried us whenever we lowered our heads, and were driven off with the chunks of rubble that we dug from the dark dirt.

  Don’t be upset, I told her as we walked back. Nothing happened.

  I kept hearing things, she muttered. Singing. From the sky. I followed it... but that was months ago. I thought it stopped.

  It’s all right, I said.

  And then she did cry, clenching her jaw against it, angry at herself. She swiped at her face with her dirty hands and left rich black smears. I ignored it, she said. I didn’t... I didn’t listen to the...

  I said, Listen. Whatever secret knowledge They brought with Them, it is not for us, not really. They will say that it is because They will say anything to have Their way with this world. How do you think They get agents? But you didn’t fall for it.

  No, she said. I didn’t.

  I can’t believe, looking back, how fast I climbed up that rock tower, nearly splitting my stitches. To shut her up, I told myself. Because the noises people make can attract all sorts of things. It’s a sign, it’s like a spell; it tells Them that something worked. I did it because I wanted to live.

  You can live with anything. You can live as anything. It always comes to an end, and then afterwards, you can say: I did what I had to, and I lived to tell the story. I bear witness, even though to do so I had to do some terrible things.

  Leg mostly healed. Will it slow me down, later?

  Where are the fireworks we were promised?

  I HAVE TO find that park. How many old parks near cemeteries are there with big trees torn down? I found a very likely candidate on the drone imagery, but I can’t find the guard tower. There are a lot of pigeons here, though. And magpies, which we have back home, but not so tamely brash. In particular they like Victor, and follow him around not wheedling scraps but keeping up a burbling commentary as if they are trying to explain what happened to the trees. The genetic memory of corvids: they’re supposed to be smart, aren’t they? I wonder what they remember. What they’ve passed down.

  The soil is still good here; even I can see that. Soft, crumbly, not dark brown but black, as black as asphalt. Privately I pocket a bagful of it, and some of Victor’s weird seeds, as we walk. Maybe I will grow them in my little apartment when I get back home next week.

  At the candidate park I think I see some evidence of cultivation, not just the ground broken but furrows still remaining, but it’s so muddled from the decades of weeds and neglect and saplings pushing up that it’s hard to tell. Instead of asking Darian to look
at the data, I ask Victor. I can’t quite put my finger on it. Since Darian is surely up to something, I feel like I can trust Victor a little more. Even though he too thinks I’m a romance writer with my head in the clouds.

  The ‘soft’ sciences, my ass. I’m corroborating the actual history of this city and that’s what they’d call me.

  I don’t know, maybe they’re right.

  October 1

  I am curious about K., but there is also the fear of insulting a dangerous man by impugning his identity in some way, which every woman perceives with a sense keener than any other. V. also has this sense, I feel certain, though I can’t imagine why. Where did I get that idea? Maybe I am simply incapable of seeing him clearly.

  But K., I see clearly. He’s educated, affable, a little older than me; he’s clearly losing weight now that he’s joined our neighbourhood, I mean, so fast it’s almost visible; even his thick hairline recedes as swiftly as a grassfire chomping great swathes out of a meadow. By joining with us, he has left behind some secret manner of feeding himself, and now he eats like we do. He could leave, I think ferociously, watching him and V. as we cross the city, as agile as rats. He could leave us.

  But he won’t.

  Now, why is that?

  It used to not be a relevant question; people just sort of clustered up, huddled together. Babes in a storm. But now, with the entire city at our disposal, you can go anywhere, and people do; you can survive alone, and people do. He’s obviously been doing well. So why leave them, and come to us?

  The sinister sparkle of that golden beard, like candyfloss!

  He joins us now, me and V. and occasionally the taciturn P., as we search for the missing. I would not have asked him, but we have so few people, and we are looking for people who are so few. Whole blocks, whole neighbourhoods, have no human life within them whatsoever, only the statues of our conquerors, their faces grossly smug, as if they are proud of having driven everyone out of the area. We get nothing good, nothing useful, from these people. In movies, I think angrily sometimes as we plod up and down the streets, we would have found an informant by now. But maybe (I think, and I think V. does too) we are carrying one with us.