These Lifeless Things

by Premee Mohamed

  V. said, That’s a good sign. They wouldn’t have put that thing there if They had nothing to protect.

  K. said nothing.

  We met tonight, briefly, to discuss the trap, and the possibility of getting the children, if they are alive. I want people to be... well. No. Let us be clear. I want to coerce everyone into helping me. I don’t care if they do it out of guilt. But I myself will feel guilty if I guilt them into helping us.

  P. is passionate, but has no plan. She stood on the coffee table in her ripped leggings and said, Listen. I was a student at the university. I was on campus on Invasion Day. My parents, my sisters, my brother, they are dead far from here—two thousand kilometers from here. This isn’t my city, this isn’t even my country. I will never go home again. But I’m willing to stay and fight because we cannot break the chain of what links the past to the future. If we die, who will tell the stories of those who survived the old conquerors?

  And T1 said: Thousands of years of conquerors. Not just these, nor the last ones, nor the ones before that.

  Silence fell while we thought of how we have all been overrun, how this land has always been under someone’s thumb, and I still wonder where P. is from and how many times her country was overrun. I cannot place her accent. At any rate we all know that the last time no one saw fit to invade anyone else’s land, we still, probably, swung from the trees. What people want, always, is to conquer. To take what belongs to the seemingly weak or the outnumbered or the outgunned... to take from the other. If you erase an entire generation and replace it with your own, the chain breaks, both ends swing free.

  She came here to learn about the past, to carry it into the future. She loves that chain. She does not want it to break.

  Me, I don’t know how I feel about it. But I suppose I will continue keeping this diary as long as I can. Hearing her, last night, I wondered who picked sides, if they had been undecided before; I wondered if it felt like it had when I did, abruptly, with a sensation like swooning or falling into an unfamiliar darkness.

  It is we who must forge the links of that chain to get the children out. No one else will.

  WAKING IN HYSTERIA, screaming, slapping at the light panels, no light, darkness, bolting into the night, crashing into something heavy, a statue, no, something else, a sentinel!

  It is Darian, startled, his hands in front of his face for a moment to protect it from my feeble half-asleep slapping; at last he takes my wrists in his hands, warm and damp, and stares at me as if I were the last thing anyone had expected to see on the planet. “Emerson?”

  I’m sputtering, I cannot speak. At last I explain that there was something in my room, something in there with me, something that touched me, that slid in through the angle between wall and ceiling from another place, and fell onto my cot, and touched me—

  He’s staring at me, honestly baffled. “A rat,” he offers a moment later, and lets me go, and even puts his hands on my shoulders for a second, surprising us both. “One of Winnie’s rats, maybe?”

  “No! It wasn’t a rat. Or maybe, I don’t know.”

  I’m shivering in my thin night clothes, not pajamas but a t-shirt and cargo pants, not dissimilar but lighter than the stuff I wear during the day (“Always,” Dr. Aaron told us, “wear something you can run in”), and he starts to steer me back towards the pod.

  I resist for a second, dig my socked feet into the sharply rubbled ground. Let the sun come up, I want to beg him. But then I go limp, and we walk back to the pod, and it’s warm inside, and there is nothing, of course, in my room; we check every corner, awkwardly weaving around each other, his big body and my small one far too much for the little space. It is spotless, no footprints, no spoor, no fur.

  “Nightmare,” I say, as we eat breakfast, when Winnie asks me what all the noise was about.

  “Oh, I’ve been getting those here,” she says. “I suppose it’s the—you know.” She waves her spoon around at the dead city. “Full immersion in the most gruesome place I’ve ever been in my life.”

  “Yeah.”

  Chernobyl, Eva said. I jump to see the word on the screen. Yes. It did split open, during the Invasion or the Setback or shortly after, and has only recently been brought back under control, somewhat, with a nanofilament shell around it like a huge honeycomb. The grumpy stalwarts still living nearby, eating their irradiated berries and mushrooms, had all vanished, of course, like virtually everyone else. No bodies. No one goes there to study now. Maybe in a hundred years or so. When we are all dead, and have passed our torches to yet another generation of eager students.

  Was it a rat I saw? I’m sure I saw something.

  This idea Eva had, that They were gods or something, I can’t get behind that, but I can’t shake it either. They had the trappings of gods, maybe They had fooled other worlds. But no hint of real divinity, except for power.

  Gods have a system.

  October 20

  Tried to return to the seminary, harried and trapped by sentinels. But, predicting it, V. and I had armed ourselves like road warriors, and somewhat to our surprise, killed (I think?) one of the statues.

  The body, seemingly solid brass, vanished into a pool of bubbling sludge (ask around: has anyone seen that?) but the head that we so inefficiently and with such effort cut off with the shovel remained startlingly, even alarmingly intact. One eye open, one eye shut, instantly glazed as if it had been sprayed with paint.

  We studied it for a while, panting, arms over our mouths and noses from the smell of its... well. You can’t say blood. It was too runny, and black and blue, and glittering, and flowed briefly over the ground, wilting the grass as it went. I watched it flow over a discarded screw, and sputter and fizz into transparency for a moment.

  We should keep it as a trophy, I said.

  Definitely not, V. said. I don’t want that anywhere near where I’m sleeping.

  That’s a good point, I said, but reluctantly; you know you can kill the sentinels, and you know you can sort of pause the statues, but it’s still academic until you are actually standing over one, watching your shovel melt away from the wooden handle.

  There, he said. That’s a proper act of war, anyway.

  Yes, I said. We should get to paint one on the side of our tank.

  Or plane.

  Yes.

  But we’d need a tank or a plane.

  There’s a lot of tanks, I said thoughtfully, in that park on the other side of town.

  Maybe, he said, we should just draw one on our arms instead.

  I wish we’d had a guillotine, I said. That took forever.

  We kept looking at the head, and then I began to feel nauseated, and faint, and we staggered away to get some fresher air. But I felt good. Hopeful, even. Not, I mean, that it’s good to kill—I don’t mean that. But that it’s good to kill if what you’re killing wants to kill you all the time and has killed just about, but not quite, everyone you loved.

  In the playground near our new flat, we sat on the swings and ate ornamental crabapples, wincing at the splendid tartness. I said, We would fight if we could, but we can’t. We would surrender if we could, but we can’t. What do you suppose that’s doing to people’s minds?

  V. shrugged. Well. It’s not like we had some... pre-existing understanding that... you know. That this dimension belonged to us.

  No pact of non-aggression or whatever.

  No. We haven’t been betrayed. I just keep wondering... why us? Why here? When They could be anywhere?

  Maybe They have a different map of the world than we do, I said hopelessly. Maybe there’s a note on certain cities saying MONSTERS WELCOME HERE.

  He said, We keep setting off Their traps. How can we get to the seminary?

  I said, We need more people.

  November 1

  I have to write this down.

  K. said, idly, while we were digging the summer potatoes, You know, negotiation with Them may not be possible, but we don’t know what other places are doing.


  I was only half-paying attention, I was sweaty, thirsty. I said, What does that mean?

  He said, How do you think we’ve all survived in the past? Not knuckling under, that’s not what I mean. Not making offerings. Just... going along with things. Being compliant.

  I filled one more bucket, I think, before I straightened up and looked at him. The wind picked up and his hair gleamed for a second in the sunlight, like the glossy grass around us. I didn’t glare, I didn’t frown, I didn’t yell or rant or wave my trowel. Only inside came a shrill, frightened yowl, drowning out all reason. I took a few deep breaths.

  I said, Appeasement, you mean.

  No! What an awful, ugly word. And the time for that is past, anyway. I mean, working together. Cooperation. At least for a little while.

  Ah, I said.

  He said, To let humanity recoup, give us a little breathing room without being so... so constantly persecuted. For God’s sake, it’s not capitulation. It’s common sense. You know They are mostly cracking down on people who offend Them in some way. I don’t know. I am just thinking aloud here.

  He was, too. And I wondered whose benefit that was for, who was listening aside from us. The grass around us rustled, but it was windy, the wind fluting through the broken glass dome, I remember that. The weeds and wildflowers looked all right, only a few twisted, with translucent, milky panes in their stems or petals, faceted like the eyes of insects. Their rich smell was all around us. I thought: If you are very small and the bees cannot see you, they will have to find you some other way; you cannot stay a secret if it is not your life’s purpose to be a secret. But you can if there are no bees.

  His speech didn’t sound rehearsed. Of course, if I were a spy, I would rehearse it till it didn’t.

  I said, mildly, Well, we’ve had thousands of years of people ‘cracking down’ on us for doing things like being located inconveniently. Or objecting to the seizing of our rail line. Or our people. Or fighting back. Or eating. Or breathing. I mean, they say Kyiv changed hands fourteen times in eighteen months, back in the day.

  He watched me in silence, leaning on his hoe. Who was listening? Who was there?

  I said, Look, we know the routine; it’s been a thousand years. Some asshole with a moustache barges in, he barely has time to turn around, you get some other asshole with a moustache. And they’ve all been putting up statues of themselves that we have to pull down and re-cast later. The least you can say about our newest conquerors is that the things growing on their faces cannot be positively identified as hair.

  He laughed; I laughed. Separately, one after the other. Inside, I felt something roiling, a witch’s cauldron of black iron filled to the brim with things struggling to break the surface, thick bubbles popping; I felt sick, I felt certain.

  But as the afternoon passed the feeling faded and now I am left, at the end of the day, with K. and V. sleeping in the living room and me thinking: Did I remember right, did I remember the conversation right? Maybe that’s not what he said. Maybe I’m exaggerating.

  More than usual tonight I feel that I am being watched, in this windowless room.

  APPEASEMENT, OF COURSE—the policy with which I’ve lived most of my short and academically-focused life—never worked; I suppose Eva wondered whether it had, anywhere. The truth was it never did, but that didn’t stop places from trying it. Compliance, as she notes, wasn’t the goal of the Invaders; but it was clear that people were disappearing, even their corpses were disappearing, and so there were numerous people who thought, “Well, we have one currency left,” and offered up their survivors as payment. But they almost all died right along with their friends. The few witnesses scrambled away with a combination of luck and the carelessness of the un-appeased, already knowing that their narratives would be hard to believe by the scholars of the future.

  It wasn’t that we believed it or disbelieved it, really; it was that we ate it up too quickly to be objective. Pain is interesting, I was told when I started my studies. People don’t want to read about happiness. They want to read about pain. That’s what’ll get you published.

  I search for the seminary, but I suppose it’s been destroyed, crumbled over the years. Maybe she will give me another clue. Even though now I’m afraid of what I might find there.

  November 10

  How did the fight start? I said, I’ll go alone. Maybe we’re setting off the traps because we go in a group.

  No, I’ll come with you, he said. You don’t need to prove how brave you are.

  I opened my mouth and shut it, stunned. No, I am a coward, I wanted to tell him. Valentin! Don’t you know that? Don’t you know me by now?

  Till the world ended I thought I was average, I thought I had an average level of... everything. Two children, one husband, just enough school, just enough intelligence, just enough height and boobs and heft and courage. I took home a pay packet that, combined with M.’s, precisely let us keep house, go on vacation once a year, and buy the latest shiny flat phones to annoy each other with.

  But when the day came, when the day came... there we were, the average four of us utterly unwarned for the tearing open of air and light. Terrified, we thought to flee to the countryside, but we let our terror paralyze us a little too long, and then we had to stay. And then the boys drafted into the defense... I remember embracing N., already so skinny, a growing boy forced by semistarvation to stop growing, his familiar body under my hands like a pillowcase full of twigs.

  They will go fight in the countryside outside the walls, we thought. We already knew that was where Their reach did not often go, since everyone is so spread out—our country has a big side. We thought the boys would be safer out there, not subject to the raids, the vanishings, the interrogations, the bombs, the ugly new statues that walked at night and left only greasy patches of blood and fat by dawn. Then we thought: if we stay in the city, the boys will find us again. Out there, only They will find us.

  And we stayed, drawing fire. I think now of the birds that feign a broken wing to lure predators away from the nest and I wonder which of us, in city or country, might be that bird. I don’t even know if they are still alive. The last message I got was over a year ago, when people could still sneak in and out of the city to a limited extent.

  I worry that the boys said something that will tip Them off, or Their agents, that they have found a way to draw bulls-eyes on their backs. I worry that they will try to reach me. I worry that they won’t. I worry that there is a word for children without parents, but none for a parent who has lost both her children.

  Well. Put that way, what have I, cowardly lion, to lose? More than V. Less than the others. I don’t know.

  And yet, I keep thinking of that darkness, it must be dark in there, They would not keep the children in a place with light; in fact, I don’t even think They see light at all.

  I think: They come from a place where the light is not like this. Or doesn’t exist. They don’t care.

  The children in the darkness, I can’t bear it. I think of N. and I. and I think... the light on their faces that last day, their light, terrified, laughing faces as they left me, the blue of their eyes just like M’s. At least they left together. Oh, God!

  We have to go.

  We cannot stay.

  November 16

  Confirmed. Really, we needed more bodies, more eyes, but we got there in the end, by pitiful subterfuge that would not have fooled a doddering mall security guard. I don’t know why we didn’t think of it before. We just... set roughly an entire street on fire, and let the sentinels come out, screaming in surprise, and in the confusion we ran the other way.

  The old seminary has its own cemetery, crawling with fist-sized monsters, their bodies bright and insulting on the ancient stones. I bared my teeth looking at it, I felt hatred crawl over my own body, I wanted to rush in there and sweep them away, slap them, like roaches or centipedes. They are ruining the inscriptions. But anyway: the grass there impossibly, sinisterly green, still, despite the c
oming winter, just as V. said.

  I put P. on watch. I don’t know how I feel about her, but I trust her instincts; she’s the wariest person I’ve ever met, she has been watching for enemies since long before the Invasion. V. and I crept down, listening, trying locked doors, tapping on the stone and brick. Expecting, still, to find nothing. Streets away, we heard the roar of the fire, and things thinly screaming; I had to close my eyes and press my entire face to the building before I heard anything.

  When the voice emerged from the hole, V. cried aloud; I almost did too. We stooped, pressed our ears to the grille. We could pry this off, he whispered. I told him to shut up.

  A thin voice from the stinking darkness. The hole, covered with a wire grille on our side, thick, screwed into the cement.

  Hello? Is that... who are you?

  I told the child our names. The things, I said. The monsters, the... Them. They’ve been stealing you, taking you down here?

  Yes. We’ve been here for... I don’t know. Maybe a year? It’s gotten cold twice. I’m Olga, the child said. There are twenty-seven of us. It’s my job to keep count because I’m the oldest.

  V. and I both looked down there, but we couldn’t see anything; I assumed that the grille was set up too high, and they had nothing to stand on. Behind us, a faint, warbling chirp from P., on the roof of the adjacent building. A long, cold wind. Leaves spattering us from the un-turned trees. All our greatest fears come true, and only one hope: that the children were alive.

  Do you know why They took you? I asked.