The wall he groped for support was slick and cold, but he pulled himself along by his nails. Toward the corridor.
“And how was that?” Mascara beamed.
Gemini wanted more. Cyan on a gondola in Paris. Cyan in tight, white shorts on London Bridge. Cyan in zero-G, Mars floating below. Cyan with rose petals in her hair.
Cyan.
“More,” Gemini rasped, clinging to the counter.
“Tsk, tsk. You’ve been a naughty boy, haven’t you.”
Gemini stared up at Mascara. “More.”
“Look, a bit of friendly advice, buddy. Go get yourself something to eat at the deli round the corner – you look worse than you smell. The Machine’ll be here when you get back. I’ll keep it open for you.”
Gemini staggered and tripped outside. “Don’t be too long!” Mascara’s voice trailed behind him. His legs weren’t used to the movement. His eyes couldn’t focus in the night air. But there it was – the deli. Green neon left shadows in his vision, as he yanked on the rusted door handle.
He found a table. A chair.
“Twenty hedons for the day’s special. Fried rice and snake on the bone.” The waitress was a million shades of gray.
“Yes,” was all Gemini could say.
The meat was bland; the fried rice dry and lifeless. In the Machine, he’d been dining on lemon-meringue under Michelin-starred chefs in New York, sipping perfectly brewed, unburnt tea at Buckingham Palace, clinking glasses of champagne bright as the Devas in Monaco. This lusterless plate was unbearable by comparison. But his hunger won out, and he scooped the rice kernels into his mouth with the thin fork. Chhaang grated at his throat as he swallowed the draft. Strength ebbed into his bones.
“That’ll be twenty-eight hedons,” the waitress said, chewing.
Gemini turned his head to give her access to his hedometer. Glass shattered behind him, and he swiveled at the noise. The paypoint the waitress had been holding lay on the floor. Her mouth hung slack, gum a colorless blob on her tongue.
“Uh …”
“What is it?” Gemini asked.
Patrons he hadn’t noticed until now were rising from their tables, gathering round him. “Avalokiteśvara!” one man whispered. “May he be free from suffering,” said a woman, clutching her mala. She flicked her thumb along the beads. A thin, welted arm reached out to touch him. A hand stroked his hair.
Gemini pushed himself from his seat, through the small crowd, and tumbled outside. “The bill!” the waitress’s voice sang behind him.
He plodded in the direction of THE CLUB. The Machine was waiting for him. But before he’d stumbled ten paces, two young men in leather jackets and feral grins approached him.
“Shit thinks he’s better than us, he does,” one said. His mono-brow wriggled as he spoke.
The other cackled luridly. “Needs a lesson in humili’y,” he said. “In ge-ne-ro-si-’y.” Cackles looked pleased with himself for enunciating all the syllables.
“We’d be helping him,” said Mono-brow.
Cackles punched Gemini in the gut. All the wind in him blew out, but nothing came back. He spluttered and gasped. A knee found his temple, a shoe his midriff. Fingers pulled and scavenged at the back of his head.
Gemini had his hedometer installed less than three months ago, when he’d won the lottery. He didn’t have one in the ghetto – nobody did. He didn’t know what Cackles and Mono-brow wanted, but he’d give it to them.
“Take whatever you want,” he said, hands shielding his face.
“Oh, we will,” said Mono-brow.
“Crack you righ’ open,” said Cackles. “Take that pre’y thing righ’ ou’ the back o’ ya’ head.”
The whistle was loud and certain. It travelled easily over the young men’s taunts. It pierced the fingers wrapped over Gemini’s ears. It stopped the young men short.
“You’ll leave him alone now,” a voice said, clear and broad. Gemini felt the men standing over him, uncertain. Waiting. Something decided their minds, and their footsteps pat-pat-pattered down the alley.
Gemini opened his eyes, to see a hand stretched down to him. Shockingly blue eyes regarded him behind square cheeks.
“I’m Anand,” said the man.
Gemini took the moisturized hand.
“My apartment isn’t far from here,” the man said. "We can sort out those cuts and bruises.”
Gemini nodded, stars floating in his vision, and followed the man home.
Neither man knew it, but before the Shangri sun struggled through the clouds the next morning, one of them would be dead.
Chapter 6
… we shall be petrified in attitudes of compulsory happiness – like those gladiatorial victims who had to hide their faces behind grinning masks as they were cut to pieces.
– Irving Wardle
“BIGS,” the sign blazed in arterial lettering. It shone through the night, casting its bloody gaze across the parking lot. Above the neon sign, Chokyong’s bedroom window was swathed in double-thick curtains that could never keep out the ruby light.
Every night was the same above the bathhouse. The last patrons left by 9pm, and Chokyong went through the motions of his night. He ate his tsampa, drank his tea, and slept, while the neon-light was slowly replaced by the dusty Shangri sunrise.
Every night was the same above BIGS. Except tonight.
Chokyong hadn’t always lived here, in Shangri, watching over the bathhouse. Twenty-three years before tonight, the night that would end this life, Chokyong’s world had been a different color.
Twenty-three years ago, the kapok cushion was soft and supportive beneath Chokyong’s buttocks. His eyes were closed, but he felt the distant peaks watching him through the open doorway. The clear winter sky sat in his chest, dusky and eternal.
He heard his wife stir, her slippers dragging along the floor. He’d made those slippers. Yak fur. The hollow sound of wood, as she piled it in the chimney. Her scent sat about his shoulders as she fumbled around the hut. He loved her smell. Pine and dragon-fruit.
Chokyong sat. The warmth of the fire played at his back. The kettle boiled and sang. And the world was silent and enormous in his heart.
It was time to begin his day. He would sip butter tea with his wife, and prepare the tsampa. Don his uniform, and wind his way down the mountain to the police station in town where he worked. Chokyong opened his eyes. The Himalayas leapt to greet him. One foot, then another. He was off the meditation cushion, and stirring the tsampa. His wife kissed his neck, placed a hand, firm and warm, on his shaved head.
They drank the butter tea together, and watched the fire. Until hooves arrived outside the door, cold and clear. He knew the sound of every horse in the village, and every rider. But he didn’t know these horses. He stood, and greeted the strangers.
“You are needed,” they said in stilted Nepalese, “in Kathmandu.” Their brown uniforms didn’t fit against the bluing sky and white ground.
“Come inside,” Chokyong said, trying not to frown. “We have enough tea for all.”
One of the men stiffened. “You are to come with us.”
“My job is here,” Chokyong said. “I am the only officer the town has. They need me.”
“The state you work for is no more.” The man gripped the barrel of the rifle standing at his side. He switched to Tibetan. “You have been conscripted.”
Chokyong’s wife came to stand behind her husband. She eyeballed the men.
“For how long?” Chokyong asked.
“It is time to go,” is all they would say.
She watched him dress in his warmest coat. She watched him fill a case with jerseys and insignia and pajamas. She watched him make the bed one last time. But she said nothing. And when Chokyong stood in the doorway and gazed at her, the men waiting behind him, she didn’t say goodbye.
Kathmandu throbbed. Urchins emerged from among cobwebs of hissing electrical wires and temple spires. But where chaos once ruled the streets, now there were endless p
rocessions of tanks and soldiers. Chokyong found a newspaper stand.
“NUCLEAR WAR,” the headline shouted. “US AND EUROPE IN TATTERS. BHUTAN PROVIDES RELIEF.”
Chokyong didn’t stay long in Kathmandu – just long enough to be issued with a uniform, a mission brief, and placed on a plane to Africa. Men in brown suits barked orders at him for two days in a variety of Bhutanese dialects.
“Africa,” they cried, “is suffering. They starve on the dunes of Sudan. Fight endlessly in the jungles of Congo and Uganda. It is our duty, as soldiers of the God of Compassion, Avalokiteśvara, to end their suffering. The world is hurting. We will aid where there is hope of recovery, and put them to rest where the pain is too great.”
The brown uniform was hard and starched, stretching and complaining against his knees as he sat on the metal bunk of the cargo plane. Plane after plane lined up before and behind Chokyong’s. Rifles, mortars, pistols and ammunition lined the interior walls of the flying behemoths. But what caught Chokyong’s eye when he boarded were the massive warheads loaded onto the bottoms of the aircraft.
Columns of soldiers, many of whom were hardly old enough to grow beards, stared at their feet, at the guns on the walls, at anything but one another’s blank faces.
“D-d-do you think we’ll come back soon?” a voice whined from beside Chokyong. The boy was thin and pale, the buttoned shirt he inhabited far too large for his fragile frame. He smelt of lavender shampoo.
Chokyong shut his eyes. He tried to picture his wife. Imagined coming home to her. Sitting beside her at the fireplace. The image blurred and strained against the metal beneath his buttocks, against the sound of jet engines readying for takeoff.
“No,” he said. “Probably not.”
The ginger boy looked up at the curved ceiling of the cargo plane. He sighed.
“M-m-milton,” he said after a minute, extending a bony hand.
The engines cycled up from a dull roar to whinnying protest, eager to push off the runway.
“I was here on holiday,” Milton said. “Arrived l-l-last week. Before the bombs hit, and everything fell to sh-shit.” Tears welled in his ashen eyes. “Came here with my girl. We were going to climb the Annap-p-purna. Don’t know where she is now.”
The plane lurched from the tarmac, and found its altitude. Milton slept most of the way to Sudan, twitching and quivering.
Chokyong craned to get a better view through the porthole window. In what looked like it had been the center of Khartoum was a crater about two miles across. The wound in the skyline pulsed a deep-orange glow in the late afternoon gloom. Beyond the crater, radiating outward in widening circles, the damage lessened. While buildings had twisted and toppled near the crater, the towers and apartment blocks near the edge of the city were for the most-part standing. “They need our help,” the officer in the brown suit had told them before they left Kathmandu. “They are suffering.”
The plane landed with an unceremonious judder, jostling glass and plastic within the box that had been placed in Chokyong’s lap. Milton had been handed a smaller box, marked “SCANNER”.
“Your mission is simple,” a man buried in epaulettes shouted above the thunder of passing jet engines.
The sun was shrouded in a continuous, impervious dust-cloud. Soldiers lined the tarmac, awaiting orders. Milton had stuck to Chokyong’s side since they’d left the plane. The lanky young man with freckled cheeks stood a full head taller than him. Although it was hotter than the hell realms, Chokyong noticed that Milton was shivering.
“You will work in teams of two. One of you scans. He’ll place the device in the person’s ear like … so.” The captain pulled aside a young soldier and jammed the proboscis of the scanner into his ear. The boy winced, but didn’t complain.
“If the scanner flashes green, then the other person – yes, those of you carrying the large boxes – will install the hedometer. The procedure is easy. Press the hedometer against the nape of the neck, and click the ‘INSTALL’ button. The device will do the rest. Then, hand them a food packet.”
A shrill beep pierced the air, and the captain examined the scanner buried in the young soldier’s ear. His brow tensed. “You’re probably wondering what happens if the scanner flashes red, as it’s doing now.” The soldiers waited. In one swift movement, the captain unholstered the pistol from his thigh, and shot the boy in the temple.
“May the world attain the constant joy of the Bodhisattvas,” he said, wiping the blood from the barrel with his handkerchief. “Chronic depression,” the captain explained to the slack-jawed soldiers. “We can’t have a happy world if its inhabitants are unhappy.”
Chokyong and Milton were deployed to an apartment block on the edge of the city. Its eastern side was blackened, but for the most part, the building was undamaged. Hundreds of sets of eyes tracked Chokyong and Milton, as they entered the basement of the building, guns drawn.
“Where do we start?” Milton asked, gesturing toward the apparently endless staircase.
“From the bottom, I guess.”
The woman opened the door without complaint. She and her husband hardly spoke as Milton placed the scanner in their ears. First her, then him. They seemed resigned to authority. When they saw a uniform, they obeyed.
The scanner flashed green for both of them.
Chokyong holstered his pistol, and opened the box of hedometers. He lifted the woman’s hair, and placed the machine at the back of her neck. Her husband looked uncertain, but said nothing. There was a hydraulic hiss as Chokyong pressed the “INSTALL” button on the screen, and it embedded into her skin with a mild sucking sound. She didn’t say a word.
They went through the entire first floor of residents with only green scans. Few protested the scan or the hedometer, and none was violent. They all accepted the food packets with smiles or handshakes. But on the second floor, they came to an apartment that wasn’t as easy.
“P-p-please hold him down, ma’am,” Milton said to the mother of the screaming child, trying to insert the scanner into his ear. “Thank you.” The scanner ticked to indicate it was getting a reading.
A moment later, a high-pitched beeping filled the apartment, and an unmistakable red light flashed on the device. Milton’s eyes found Chokyong’s. His heart leapt at the sudden sound. Somehow the first floor of inhabitants had lulled Chokyong into the false belief that they wouldn’t find a red result.
“He’s only a child,” Milton said.
Chokyong’s body was rigid, petrified.
The mother took her child in her arms, rocking it to silence. She didn’t know what the beeping meant.
“We c-c-can’t,” Milton said, his voice rising an octave.
The radio at Chokyong’s waist burst into static. “Soldier F4, report,” the speaker blurted in Nepalese.
The child sniffled, and buried its head in its mother’s breast.
The temperature seemed to drop a hundred degrees right then, creeping into Chokyong’s fingertips, into his bones, into his jaw. He took the radio.
“F4.” He swallowed. “Reporting.”
“Red result received,” the radio crackled.
“A mistake,” said Chokyong.
“The scanners don’t make mistakes,” the captain said over the radio. “Carry out procedure.”
Chokyong couldn’t think. Couldn’t move.
“F4, carry out procedure,” the captain repeated.
“It’s a child, sir.”
“Unhappiness is unhappiness. Carry out procedure.”
When Chokyong didn’t reply, the captain continued, “Or you will be court-marshaled for insubordination. Bring back the body for verification.”
Chokyong was the only person in the room who understood Nepalese. The only person who understood what had to happen next.
That afternoon sat in the chest of Chokyong over the months and years and nights that followed. The sight of the child lying against its mother, falling asleep, never left him. Not while he completed his tour. Not wh
ile he was flown to the United States, recently renamed “Shangri”. Not when he was given ownership of BIGS for his loyal service. Not while he failed to sleep, night after night, above the neon light of the bathhouse. And not when he heard knocking on the double-doors to BIGS downstairs, long past curfew.
He threw on his robe, and hurried downstairs. A woman with a swollen belly and raven hair stood in the doorway. She had that look. The look the child’s mother had that afternoon in Khartoum when he’d reached for his pistol.
Long wisps of hair clung to her shoulders, against a nightie white as her bloodless cheeks. And where the hair touched the cotton, the material was wet with a crimson stain.
“Help us,” she said.
Part 2
Chapter 7
Having children really changes your priorities.
– Cindy Crawford
Cyan stared at Gemini’s silhouette standing in the window of their apartment. At the strange, tall shadow beside his. She couldn’t go home – it could be the police, the Brownies. It was after curfew. She’d be ghettoed, or worse.
She turned on her rubber heels, and began the long walk to Anand’s apartment. She’d memorized the route as he drove from the market, while she’d clutched his chest.
It was something she’d learned in the ghetto – memorizing the way she’d come. Living in the ghetto, one was forced to have a superb sense of direction. Other than the buildings that predated the Collapse, the ghetto was a shanty-town, made up of hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of shacks. They sprung up where and when they wished, popping out of the ground overnight, out of the metal earth. There was no order to the higgledy-piggledy tin structures. No plan. The ghetto was an undulating, dynamic maze of humanity.
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