Hedon

by Jason Werbeloff

  Cyan trudged along the highway. The Wall stretched into the distance on the other side of the road. After curfew, the holo-ads that obscured the Wall during the day were switched off, leaving only the search lights. Without the holograms, the state of the Wall became clear. Ever-thickening fissures spider-webbed up and across the structure. Without the holo-ads, it looked like a strong gust could tear down the Wall. But Cyan knew better. It was at least a yard thick, two yards in places. Many from the ghetto had tried and failed to burrow through the concrete before the sentries spotted them.

  Tap … tap … tap.

  Cyan bent down. Tried to remove the stone caught in the tread of her shoe, but it wouldn’t budge. It was wedged, part of her journey now. She shouldn’t complain. To have sneakers, to have shoes of any description was a luxury. She thought about the night her mother had returned home from her job at the crematorium. She would usually work late, and that night was no exception. The sun had already set behind the Wall, and the ghetto was dark, save for the fires that warmed those who could find something to burn.

  “My Cyan,” her mother had said, pulling closed the tin door, “I’m sorry it’s late.” She came over to her daughter, passed a hand through the girl’s long hair. Cyan hugged her mother’s tummy.

  “You know you’re my angel,” she said, kissing the crown of Cyan’s head. “This is for you.”

  It was a packet, and inside the packet, a box taped together. And within the box … they were pink! Cyan could see they’d been scrubbed clean. The shoes looked almost new. Cyan squealed as she dug her toes into the spongey soles. It didn’t matter that her feet swam about in the enormous shoes. She was an adult now.

  Cyan walked, and walked, along the Wall. The sentries in the towers above leered at her. They wouldn’t bother with her so long as she didn’t cross the road and approach the Wall. She shouldn’t be out here, though, past curfew. If a police car happened to drive by … but here was the off-ramp that led to Anand’s apartment.

  It was a poorer part of Shangri than the area where the Embryology Bureau had located her and Gemini. From the black soot that coated the northern walls, it looked like the buildings here hadn’t been painted since the Collapse. Washing draped every balcony, and most windows. But however dilapidated the buildings were, any ghetto dweller would move here in a heartbeat.

  Cyan’s pink sneakers found their way up the street, up the staircase. And there was Anand, eyes wide at the sight of her. He held her, his arms safe, his lips on her neck raking her with a million needles. Yes, she needed him. But oh, she wanted him.

  That night they made love again. And then again. By morning it was clear what had happened. The hunger had begun.

  “Um, do you have more?” Cyan asked, rubbing her stomach.

  Anand, delighted that she liked his pancakes, made another batch. She drowned them in butter and syrup and jam and cinnamon and sugar.

  An hour later, Anand had no more pancake mix, no more cereal, Soylent, muesli, milk, bacon, eggs. Cyan had eaten everything.

  They stared at each other over the dozens of used plates and pans, the yellow and green and blue empty packaging. “I think,” said Cyan, “that I’ve fallen.”

  Anand paled. “They gave you the fertility treatment?”

  “Yes. Two week formula.”

  “Kwan-yin!” Anand paced the tiny apartment, which meant leaping between blank spots among pots, recipe books, crockery and blenders.

  The storm clouds in his eyes evaporated. “My hedometer,” he said, “what is the reading?” He turned away from Cyan, allowing her to examine the glass screen at the nape of his neck.

  “Lord Buddha,” she said, “you must have really enjoyed last night.”

  He smiled. “Then it’s time for us to go shopping.”

  “Us?” Cyan asked. “I’m probably a wanted woman by now. They’ll be looking for me.”

  The gravity of the situation hit him. The storm returned to Anand’s face. “You’re,” he said, “you’re a Breeder? A lottery winner?”

  “Yes. I’ve abandoned my husband. They’ll come after me. The Tax Man. The Brownies. All of them.”

  Anand took her hand. “You can stay with me,” he said. “I’ll take care of you until it’s time. And then … we’ll figure it out.”

  Cyan’s eyes welled and burst. The expectations and the disappointments of the last months flooded her heart, overwhelming her thin frame. She heaved giant, mucosal sobs into Anand’s shoulder, until minute by minute, breath by breath, she calmed.

  “We’ll find a way,” said Anand. “Let’s get some food into you. That’s what’s important right now. I’ll go to the market.”

  “Don’t you have work? What do you do?”

  Cyan watched Anand’s certainty and energy collapse into a tiny point. “I … I …” Anand lowered his head.

  She realized then what he was. A serviceman. That’s why he could kiss her the way he did. Fuck her the way he did. That’s why his sex was better than his cooking, and his cooking put the vanilla dumplings from the market to shame.

  She squeezed his hand. “That’s okay,” she said, “we’ve all had to do things we don’t want to, in Shangri.” Anand snapped his gaze to her, then out the window to see nobody was within earshot. Cyan watched his eyes tighten to slits at hearing her blasphemy. The tension in his shoulders.

  She rubbed her stomach. Could he cope with the sudden tangent his life was about to take? In two weeks, the baby would be born.

  Anand’s jaw hurt. It was the sixth cock he’d sucked this morning. The bigger ones were the problem. Stretched his ligaments to tearing. And some of the men took forever to finish. Normally he’d ice his jaw after a demanding patron, but he didn’t have the time today. He had to fulfill his quota so he could get to the market. Cyan was hungry. Ravenous.

  He knew the Breeders ate plenty. She was eating for two, after all. But Anand had no idea until now just how much food the woman could consume. Master Dzogo explained that in the days before the Embryology Bureau, it took Breeders nine months to give birth. An enormous waste of time. So the Bureau came up with a way to compress the gestation period to two weeks. Which meant that mothers could get back to work sooner. “Because,” Master Dzogo would say, “what is one woman’s suffering compared with the happiness of all?” But accelerating the gestation period meant the baby needed nine months of food in just two weeks.

  The next patron opened the door to the sauna and sat opposite Anand. He reached out a furtive hand, and in a moment Anand was at work. To hurry the process, he used a technique favored by most servicemen – the lick-and-flick. The man’s knees buckled, and he groaned just like all the others.

  Anand finished his quota by 2pm, leaving plenty of time for the market. He loved it no less for having been there every day this week. He’d made three chickens and a large salmon for dinner last night, and Cyan had polished them off without pause. Tonight was time for lobster and prawns. Shellfish was expensive, even for Anand, but the hedons he was amounting from all the cooking were more than enough. He could afford to buy as much as Cyan could eat. He bought three-hundred king prawns and six lobsters. Driving back to the apartment, the smell of the sea at his back, his heart fluttered at the thought of a new butter-sauce recipe he’d wanted to try.

  Cyan was sleeping when he arrived, but her mouth curled into a smile when he kissed her growing belly and placed a hand against her cheek.

  “My fearless chef,” she said, holding his fingers to her lips.

  “I want you,” said Anand, stroking her hair.

  “You have me.” Her stomach groaned.

  “Right!” Anand jumped into action, tossing the first hundred prawns into the largest wok he had, and two of the lobsters into a pressure-cooker. He knew he’d be busy at the stove well into the small hours of the night. But the salt-and-butter fragrance that touched his nostrils was more than worth it. And the look on Cyan’s face as she savored every bite. He loved her.

  That’s how
they spent those five days. He cooked and she ate. She smiled that smile, and he laughed. She watched his forearms, and he watched her soul growing with the child’s.

  “What will we name him?” Anand asked between lobsters.

  “Him? What makes you think it’s a boy?”

  Anand blushed. He’d assumed it was a boy. Because the baby was something he wanted, something valuable and whole. A boy.

  Cyan stood, her fingertips dripping garlic and chili. Her eyes narrowed, and she stared at him, into him. “What if she’s a girl?”

  Anand wanted to forget what he’d said. He wanted her to forget. And he wanted to return to his wok. He had another hundred prawns to fry, and another lobster in the fridge.

  Cyan swayed imperceptibly on her feet. But she wasn’t ready to sit. “Tell me. What would you do if it’s a girl?”

  “Please, Cyan. Let’s not think about this now. We’ll know soon enough.” His hand itched to grab the remaining frozen prawns, but something in the way her nose wrinkled, the way her forehead bunched, stopped him.

  “Would you care less for her if she were a girl?” she persisted.

  Years of Master Dzogo’s lessons flooded Anand’s brain. “A woman is a threat to your happiness,” Master Dzogo would say at least once a month. “Her breasts are a threat to the purity of your eyes. Her voice a threat to the purity of your mind. Her smile is a threat to the purity of your heart. The seed of suffering lies in her belly, waiting.”

  “I …” Anand began, but he didn’t have the words Cyan wanted. “I would try,” he finished.

  Cyan slapped him. And the world folded into that point on his cheek. Every man who’d fucked him at BIGS. Every time a patron had bitten his nipples, or pushed inside him too quickly. All the assaults to his body, to his dignity, squeezed and funneled into that spot on his cheek Cyan had touched so violently. And he couldn’t stand it. The throb of it.

  He switched off the stove, and made his way to the door. He felt Cyan’s eyes on the back of his head, on his hedometer, as he left. “I’m –” she shouted after him as he closed the door gently behind him.

  His cheek stung. His life stung, as he faltered down the two flights of stairs. Something had been lost. No, not lost. Some illusion. Some edifice that he thought was always there, had left him. The castle that held his daily shame had burst its fortifications. He watched his feet as he paced, because he couldn’t stand to look up. For someone to see the darkness in his eyes.

  Master Dzogo was wrong, he knew. But what came after that knowledge? What replaced the vacuum that Master Dzogo had filled? Without the precepts and the Noble Ways, what was left?

  Anand perambulated as he brooded. Onto the side-street, and along the main thoroughfare. His brain hardly registered the cocktail bars, the heroin outlets, the delis.

  He loved her. He did. And he would love the baby. Even if it was a girl. And then he knew the answer to his question. Cyan was what remained when the precepts and Noble Ways evaporated. Cyan was his refuge, he decided. And all seemed clear, when a voice pierced his thoughts.

  “Crack you righ’ open. Take that pre’y thing righ’ ou’ the back o’ ya’ head.”

  The voice was loud and shrill. Young and excitable. Like some of the boys that arrived at BIGS, freshly graduated from school, looking for a hole to fill. Anand felt the tiny hairs on his arms spring to attention. There was a man curled into a ball on the ground, his hands over his ears. Two boys were kicking him, jeering at him.

  He whistled, something sharp and toothed. “You’ll leave him alone now,” a voice emanated from Anand’s chest that he didn’t recognize. It was deep and indignant. It was the voice of a serviceman who knew when enough was enough.

  The boys looked up at him, and the thought of fighting seemed to cross their features for a moment. Anand took a step forward, his fists clenched with the shame of years of submission. They ran, cursing nervously as their feet splashed through puddles of urine and rain. They were gone.

  He went to the man on the ground, and touched a fresh bruise on his cheek. “Are you alright?”

  The man unfurled, and stood with Anand’s help.

  “Thank you,” the man said, dazed.

  “My apartment isn’t far from here,” said Anand. "We can patch up those cuts and bruises.”

  The man’s eyes slid off Anand’s face as he spoke, pooling in the distance. They walked in silence for a while. “I’m Anand,” he said eventually.

  The man didn’t reply. Didn’t shake his extended hand. He looked away, to some other possible world.

  Gemini wasn’t sure where he was. He’d been in the Experience Machine for … a day? Two days? He remembered eating, but was that merely an Experience produced by the Machine? He pinched his skin, and it smarted. But there was pain and pleasure in the Experience Machine too. Was this reality? Was this Shangri? Or maybe, Shangri wasn’t real after all. Maybe, the life that he’d been living these two and a half months outside the ghetto was just an Experience in the Machine. Maybe his real life was somewhere else. Was Cyan real? Maybe the Machine had conjured her too.

  As his brain wandered through labyrinthine possibilities, he followed the man who’d helped him escape the two boys. This must be just another Experience, he surmised, because in real life a stranger wouldn’t stop to help. In reality, when people wanted to hurt you, they succeeded.

  So he decided to play out the Experience. The adventures created by the Machine so far were as fantastic as they were improbable. He’d battled ogres and competing suitors, climbed Olympus Mons in a space suit, and crossed vast reaches of starless space. All to find Cyan. In the Experiences the Machine created, he always found her in the end. So Gemini relaxed, and enjoyed the walk, getting into character.

  The place was a reproduction of Shangri. He’d seen this area before in his real life. The Machine must have reproduced it. Ah well, it didn’t matter. If this was an Experience, he’d see Cyan soon enough. She always appeared. And she was always glad to see him, smiling that Cyan smile that stopped his breath every time.

  He followed the man up a steep flight of stairs. The Machine had given him a slow, tired body in this Experience. It was just another obstacle the Machine had put in his path. Another challenge, so that when he found her at the end of the Experience, their reunion would be all the sweeter.

  Gemini appreciated the attention to detail in this constructed world. The grime on the bricks, the way the clouds shifted and broiled in the afternoon sky, were almost perfectly rendered. He could see the occasional flaw though – little gaps in his vision filled with stars if he stared too long. But for the most part, this Experience was superbly designed. He made a mental note to compliment Mascara when he next came out of the Machine.

  Two long, breathless flights of stairs later, and the man he was following stopped outside a door. He reached for his keys, paused for a moment, then unlocked it.

  The apartment was tiny, and filled with a massive array of cookware. Gemini thought that inserting the cookware in the room was a bit lazy of the Machine. He’d had at least three Experiences of eating in phenomenally good restaurants, and the Machine, it seemed, was inserting old elements into new Experiences. So, absurdly, the room was packed with kitchenware, along every wall, every surface, and on most of the floor. (The Machine could have used books, trash, anything else really, Gemini thought).

  He stepped inside the apartment, and kicked a blender. It fell on its side with a bang, louder than he would have thought. The acoustics in here weren’t bad. Full surround sound – hard to simulate in an Experience. And the smell was exceptionally well-rendered. He could taste the butter and garlic on the air. And bread, fresh bread, in the oven. That detail impressed him most. His father had baked bread just like that when he was a boy. For the Machine to have read his memory and reproduced it here was astonishing.

  The Machine must have brought him here for a reason, though. When he glanced around, he found it. A figure lay on the bed on the other side of t
he room. He shuffled forward, knocking over a pile of plates. What fun! And yup, just as expected, the figure on the bed was a woman. It was Cyan.

  As he did in every Experience the Machine created for him, Gemini smiled broadly and spread his arms to embrace her. Pots and recipe books and cutlery and glasses erupted about him as he forged a path toward her.

  The moment she did it, she regretted it. The slap rang out in the humid apartment. It sat on the air, floating on garlic. It was the look Anand gave her the moment after. As if she were a monster, someone responsible for every evil there was. For the Wall. For the Debreeding. For the Tax Laws.

  When Anand turned away from her, he took a chunk of her soul with him. To lose his gaze was agony. He was out the door, and she didn’t know what would happen. When would he come back? Would he kick her out? What would she do, so heavily pregnant? The hunger. What would she eat?

  Her knees unhinged, and she had to lie down. She found her way to the bed. The smell of Anand dressed the pillow. A perfect mix of wet earth and honey. But it wasn’t Anand who lived behind her closed eyelids as she drifted to sleep.

  Gemini. It was that day she’d met him outside the butchery as he was locking up. In her dream she was there again, watching his fuddlesome fingers finding the key to the lock. They were long, those fingers. Pianist’s fingers, her mother would call them. But Cyan had never seen a pianist or a piano. The fingers, though, weren’t what captured her. It was his hands. Delicate. Proportioned. And the way he used them, oblivious of their beauty. She would watch him in the weeks and months and years that followed while he worked in the butchery. He’d toss those hands about, slapping them onto huge hunks of meat, flinging through blood and offal without a thought. That’s what had drawn Cyan to Gemini. The incongruity of those perfect hands buried in the death of the world –

  The dream ended as abruptly as it had started. The key turned in the door, and she opened her eyes.