Hedon

by Jason Werbeloff

  “Gemini Rustikov,” a voice rumbled from within the leather jacket.

  Gemini blinked, parted his lips, but could say nothing.

  “Are you Gemini Rustikov?” The voice was made of stone. Stones rubbed together in a tub of gasoline.

  “Uh … yes.” Gemini eyed the holster on the man’s hip. A set of knuckledusters hung from a chain on The Tax Man’s belt.

  “The Tax Bureau has determined that your hedometer reading is low.” In a fluid movement, without slowing his speech, the man reached behind him and grabbed a chair. He never moved his mirrored gaze from Gemini. “Your hedon reading is close to the Minimum Requirement.” He sat, thrusting his knees toward Gemini with a menacing leather creak.

  Gemini wanted to crawl under his jotting paper. His hand was trembling.

  His hand.

  Gemini dropped his pencil, and stuffed his hands beneath his buttocks.

  “Venerable Sir, thank you for your presence,” he said, bowing his head. “I am at your service.”

  “What is causing the hedometer drop?”

  “Uh …”

  “Citizen Rustikov,” the man boomed, “it is no shame to speak the truth. Right Speech is a step on the Noble Path to happiness.”

  Gemini’s collar felt tighter than the PVC pants stretched over The Tax Man’s bulbous knees. Did he know, Gemini wondered, about the shakes? The trembling?

  “Two months ago you won the lottery,” The Tax Man said. “How is life beyond the ghetto?”

  “It …” Gemini was thrown by the question, “it’s good.”

  “Yes, Shangri is wondrous. But how,” the man paused, “how is married life?”

  Gemini found himself in the stretched reflection of The Tax Man’s sunglasses. Seeing himself there, alone, an idea came to him. It was her fault. She couldn’t fall. She didn’t laugh anymore. She no longer smiled at him when she greeted him. She looked past him. It was her fault.

  “Cyan, my wife, is … difficult,” he said.

  The Tax Man’s expression softened for the first time. As much as that concrete face could soften.

  Encouraged, Gemini continued, “She’s not how she was. The move from the ghetto has changed her, Venerable Sir.”

  The Tax Man nodded.

  “I fear she won’t fall if she’s so unhappy.” Gemini’s confidence was growing. He removed his hand from beneath his thigh. It didn’t tremble as he adjusted the fringe of his hair. He touched the glass of the hedometer above the nape of his neck. “I love her. I do.” He closed his eyes. Put his head in his hands.

  “Shangri takes care of its citizens,” The Tax Man said.

  Gemini looked up with bloodshot eyes.

  “A memory review will reveal the best intervention,” The Tax Man said.

  Gemini nodded, lips pursed.

  “I’ll need to do a memory dump of your and your wife’s hedometers. Where is Cyan?”

  “At my apartment.” He glimpsed the golden knuckledusters in the corner of his vision.

  “Call her. Tell her to expect us.”

  Gemini lifted the yellowing receiver to his ear and dialed. His fingers were steady as they punched the numbers.

  Fuck Kwan-Yin, Cyan thought, it was going to be a long day.

  “Quiet the mind, and life will flow.” They’d been trying for two months. Gemini arrived home every night from his job at the Cartoon Bureau, and dutifully ploughed her. The first few weeks, trying to be accommodating, Cyan moaned regularly. Like a cow in a distant field. She synchronized the moans with the squelches her beneaths produced. She tried screaming once, but Gemini raised an eyebrow to that. After the screaming incident, she’d stopped the pretense, and lay there quietly. She knew her role.

  Yes, winning the lottery was a blessing. Life outside the ghetto was better, sure. More food (oh, chocolate!). Easier access to drugs. And, at first, the thought of a child had excited her. She daydreamed about tiny fingers grasping hers. It would be satisfying, she reasoned, to love something, someone, the way she’d never loved Gemini or anyone else. Because, as Master Dzogo said, a child brought into this world with the blessing of the Embryology Bureau (but only with the blessing of the Embryology Bureau) was a holy happening. And she knew, just knew, that she would love this child with everything she never had.

  Gemini took to the task eagerly at first. Twice-a-night. It felt odd to be … allowed to have heterosexual sex. Not just allowed, but expected. They had three months to fall. A month in, and Cyan worried. Gemini didn’t seem as concerned. His pale buttocks resumed their inexorable rhythm every night, twice a night, into the next month. But after six weeks, even he started to wonder what might be wrong. He thrust harder, more violently, as if that would help. As if bringing a child into the world was determined by the tension in his thighs, the sweat on his brow.

  And now it had been two months since the lottery ticket that had won them their freedom. “Quiet the mind,” Master Dzogo had advised, “and life will flow.” So she had. She’d stopped her work at the Joke Bureau, and spent all her time at home drinking green tea and meditating. Back to the ghetto. That’s where she’d be in a month if she didn’t fall by then.

  Cyan opened one eyelid, and glimpsed the timer. She’d increased the Samadhi meditation to three hours daily. She’d tried focusing on her breath first, as Master Dzogo instructed. Then she’d moved to mantras, mandalas, candles, and sound. Nothing. No swelling belly. No fall.

  “I can’t,” she’d told Master Dzogo, “something is wrong.” But the old man would crinkle the crevasses around his mouth into a smile, and nod patiently. She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream. She wanted to lift a brick, one of the millions of bricks in the ghetto Wall. Lift it high, and smash the old man’s skull in. Wipe that smirk off his rubbery lips. But all she did was nod. Nod and smile. And then return home, and meditate some more.

  One month, that’s all she had left.

  “15:30”, the LED screen flashed. An hour, and Gemini would be home. Maybe tonight it would work. But she knew better. Something was wrong. It was her, something tied up in her. Some blockage. Some darkness in her beneaths. Dry leaves, scratching on a cloudy night. Cold. Lifeless.

  Cyan stood slowly from the cushion and trod to the apartment window. The gray-white light marked the dying of another day, inching her closer to the three-month deadline. She stared blankly at the building across the square. There was another couple on the sixteenth floor, two apartments from the end. Lottery winners too. She watched the woman sing to her baby, cradling it like it belonged. She couldn’t hear, of course, but she imagined she could. She heard the songs her mother sang to her, before Shangri. The lullabies that brushed against her forehead, loved her from everywhere. Where was her mother now, she wondered? Was she still living in the pink tin house behind the old factory? Would they ever meet again?

  She stood there a long while, watching the woman rock the baby back and forth. Her features were open and warm. As though a gentle eraser had been passed over the pencil lines of her face. Cyan had felt that expression on her own face, but long ago. Yes, maybe she’d loved Gemini once. When they’d met. The way his hair fell across his forehead when he laughed. Oh, he’d had gorgeous hair. Black, thick as night. Sculpted thighs and glowing eyes.

  A sound roused Cyan. But it wasn’t the sound of the lock on the apartment door. She thought of how he would enter when he did arrive. He would peck her cheek, squeeze her shoulder tentatively. When she raised her gaze to meet his, she would try not to notice that his face had grayed. Try not to notice that those vibrant cheeks had thinned, sunken. He would smile at her, but the glow of youth would be absent from his eyes.

  Yet the key didn’t turn in the lock. Must have been the wind, she thought.

  Cyan was only a child when the wind had started. When the Bhutanese had taken over. She didn’t remember much from before Shangri. But she remembered playing on the swings in the park. They were red-red, the swings. Her mother stood behind her, hands warm and enormous on her
back as she pushed. Cyan remembered laughing so hard, she couldn’t catch her breath as the swing fell back to earth. But that moment, just before it did, when she was suspended in the air. That moment before pushing away, falling back. That moment between two thoughts, when the sun lived in her hair.

  That’s when it happened.

  A light. A flash brighter than her mother’s smile. Brighter than God. And then … then the wind. It threw her off the swing, back, back past her mother. She woke later, and her mother was kneeling over her, calling Cyan’s name. Calling, and calling.

  Things had been different after that. The sky had darkened. The men in brown suits had arrived. And the wind, that north wind, never stopped blowing. It tore over the mountains from the north. In the mornings, you could hear it whistling through your nostrils if you held your breath and kept real quiet. But it was strongest in the afternoons. Could blow a grown man right off his feet if he wasn’t careful.

  This afternoon was no different. She sat on the balcony of the apartment, and even under shelter she felt the wind play along her cheek. The way her mother had touched her that day at the swings.

  Cyan had spent the day waiting. Meditating. Waiting. And it was almost 5pm. “16:49”, flashed the clock. He should be home. Gemini was never late. But the key in the lock didn’t turn. “16:53”, and still, nothing. The phone rang. The electronic shriek snapped the tenuous calm she’d been cultivating all afternoon.

  “Going to be home soon, darling,” Gemini said. He never called her darling.

  “Alright.” Cyan bit her lip.

  “Soon,” Gemini repeated. “Why don’t you get us some of those dumplings you like? Market should still be open. I’ll be home by the time you get back.”

  “Sure.”

  Master Dzogo said the vanilla Soylent dumplings helped the falling. So she ate them often. But they stank.

  The Embryology Bureau had given them an apartment two blocks from the market. “Good to walk,” Master Dzogo would say, “but slowly, mindfully.” So she did. She leaned into the wind as she rounded the apartment building. Felt the thrill of the air in her hair.

  The market was full of hagglers. It was March, and buyers had few hedons to spend after they’d paid their taxes only weeks before. Luxury stores, like the marijuana outlet and the video shop, were empty. It was risky spending on extravagances now. They often didn’t quite replenish the hedons they cost. Sometimes one got lucky – a high-quality spliff or a side-splitting comedy. You might land up with more hedons than it cost to buy them. But more often than not, the drugs were flat, and the movie was bad. Happiness was a risky business.

  Cyan wandered through the labyrinth of tables, hopping this way and that to avoid the plastic packets pirouetting in the wind. She found the dumpling stand.

  “What you want?” the old woman warbled.

  “Vanilla,” Cyan said. “Six please.”

  She turned on her heels, and the old woman held the paypoint to the back of Cyan’s head. Boop, her hedometer sounded, as the funds were transferred.

  Cyan took the pack, and meandered through the other stalls. A stronger gust blew her hair across her eyes, and before she could flick it back, she was knocked off her feet.

  “Oh, oh! I … I didn’t see you.”

  Cyan looked up at chiseled cheeks. Blue eyes lit up the mahogany skin surrounding them. And a crease of concern blanketed his forehead. Crinkled the nose just so.

  The young man extended his hand behind her head to help her up. “Are you okay?” The hand was soft, firm.

  “I,” Cyan began but he interrupted.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said. The crease in his brow furrowed. Another blast of wind slapped a plastic packet across his face. The sincerity and seriousness of his expression replaced so easily with the dirty plastic struck Cyan as incredibly funny. She started to giggle then, and couldn’t stop. And when he removed the packet, he joined her. Her tension, the waiting, the trying but never falling, blew away on the north wind.

  “I’m Anand,” the young man said, his cheeks full. The blue in his eyes was the color of the sky before the bright light that day on the swing. Before the clouds blanketed the earth, and the Brownies arrived. Before the Collapse and the Debreeding. Before the ghetto. Before Shangri.

  Beep

  An hour later, they reached Anand’s apartment block, and dismounted his bike. They took the stairs at a gallop, Anand trailing an arm behind him for Cyan to grab as she giggled after him. He turned the key in the sheet-metal door, and they were inside.

  Cyan regarded the space. It wasn’t as big or as clean as the apartment the Embryology Bureau had given Gemini. But Anand had scrubbed the bubbling wallpaper and concrete floor as best he could. The brown streaks that the north wind delivered to the surfaces of most apartments in Shangri were hardly visible in Anand’s.

  The kitchen.

  It was obvious to Cyan that it had started in the corner of the room as a stovetop and sink. But Anand had slapped together ad hoc counters, and lined them with blenders and juicers, grinders and mixers, pots and colanders, waffle irons and pans. The kitchen had tentacled through the tiny apartment, until the only space remaining was for the overwhelmed single-bed.

  Anand bounded into action, grabbing a wok from one corner, and leeks from one of the packets in Cyan’s hand. With dexterous leaps across stacks of crockery and recipe books, Anand lit the gas stove, processed the tomatoes, onions and peppers, and tossed them into the sizzling pan. In minutes, the tiny apartment was suspended in a cloud of cumin and coriander.

  Cyan watched the beautiful young man’s hedometer clicking up and up, an enormous grin plastered across his high cheekbones. But it was his forearms. Their smooth, oval muscles were taut as Anand chopped away at the apples they’d bought at the market. It was his forearms, as he pounded and rolled, pounded and rolled, the dough for the pastry.

  He fed her the salsa from a steady fork swirled in perfectly buttered prawns. She leaned a little further against the countertop with every prawn he placed in her mouth. He studied her across the hazy expanse as she chewed. There was a magic in the humidity. Yes, Cyan could touch both sides of the apartment at a stretch, but that tiny room held Cyan’s world that night.

  She touched him with wet fingertips, just there – that oval muscle in his forearm. His grin never faltered, not even for a moment, as he reached a hand to stroke her hair.

  And while they kissed, and touched, and groped; while Cyan found herself lying prone and whole on the polyfiber blanket; while the smell of apple tart in the oven almost-done soaked her hair; while the world found its way between her thighs; during all of it, Cyan didn’t think the thought even once. The thought that had governed her every action since she’d won the lottery. The thought of falling.

  Cyan fell.

  Chapter 3

  Be grateful for what you have now.

  – Rhonda Byrne

  The Tax Man held open the passenger door of the black Mercedes for Gemini.

  “I can walk, Venerable One. The apartment isn’t far. I walk back every evening.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” The Tax Man chuckled. “I don’t bite.”

  Gemini examined the man’s needle-like incisors, and swallowed. He took a seat in the Merc, and The Tax Man closed the door after him.

  The hand-stitched silence that enveloped Gemini was soft and dangerous. His buttocks sunk into the white leather; his ink-stained fingers rested on the wooden dashboard before him. The driver’s door opened, and The Tax Man sat. His enormous legs stretched out to tap at the monstrous vehicle’s pedals.

  Silence, padded and thick, sat between them.

  “What do you think of Shangri, coming from the ghetto?” The Tax Man asked once they’d left the Cartoon Bureau’s parking lot.

  “Wondrous.” Gemini responded immediately, “Venerable Sir,” he added.

  Gemini slid his trembling hand beneath his thighs. Willed it to stop. This wasn’t a good time to reveal that he had the
shakes. With his already-low hedometer reading, if The Tax Man knew Gemini was ill, he’d likely scrap the marriage counseling, and move directly to repossession. “Do not fear the end,” Master Dzogo would say, “for it is only the start of a greater journey.” But Gemini didn’t want to die, no matter what Master Dzogo said about repossession.

  The Tax Man didn’t speak the rest of the five minute journey to the apartment block. Every time Gemini swallowed, the rasping, scraping sound in his throat was deafening.

  Placing his feet on the gravel of the square in front of the apartment block was an enormous relief.

  “I have here …” The Tax man looked at a slip of paper. “… that you stay in apartment 362?”

  “That’s correct,” Gemini said, leading the way. Cyan would be back by now, and would have cooked up the dumplings. It was unlikely The Tax Man would eat with them (Gemini had heard that the tax men ate only the very best chef-prepared meals), but he had to offer.

  Four flights of stairs, and Gemini was unlocking the door. He felt the ubiquitous presence of The Tax Man behind him. Smelt his aftershave – something fruity and light – as he fumbled with the key.

  “Cyan!” Gemini called as they entered. “Cyan!” He checked the bedroom. The bathroom.

  The Tax Man found his way to the sofa, and sat at the edge of the cushion.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” Gemini said, “but she isn’t home yet.”

  “I can wait. We’ll do your dump in the meantime.”

  Beads of sweat sprung upon Gemini’s brow. “Of course, Venerable Sir.”

  The Tax Man stood to his full height, and reached into his back pocket. He brought out a cable.

  Gemini had been told it didn’t hurt. This was just a memory read, not an alteration. But feeling the cable slide into the back of his head, its teeth locking into place, was intensely uncomfortable, even if it wasn’t painful. What if The Tax Man read his memories of the shakes? But he wouldn’t, Gemini reminded himself, because he was here to counsel the marriage.