Nicola Griffith - Slow River

I stopped a moment. Think. I had to think. How would he be feeling? What did he know about the plant? Where would he go?

“Sabotage? How could someone sabotage this place?”

“Any number of ways, but the best place would be right at the beginning… ”

The influent. I ran.

There are times when the brain can’t deal with what it sees, so part of it sits back and the rest looks closely at some irrelevant piece of information. I noted that the concrete under my feet was shuddering with the weight of water coursing beneath it; that when the huge trap in the floor was pulled back the air not only hissed and roared with the exposed flow, but that it tasted different.

And why, I wondered, were people who were about to kill themselves so compulsively neat?

Paolo’s skinny was beautifully folded, collar top-and-forward the way shirts are sold in their cellophane packages. I had never been able to fold clothes like that. His limbs were piled just as neatly next to the skinny, all except one arm, which lay on its own to the side. I wondered idly how he had managed to take off that last arm, the right, I think. I supposed the designers had worked out a simple push-and-twist method.

Paolo was belly-down at the corner of the open trap, torso balanced over the chasm, lowering his throat toward the buzz razor jammed into the space between cover and floor.

“Don’t,” I said. Don’t, because it will please Hepple; because it will make a mess and I’ll have to clean it up. Don’t, because you won’t be able to change your mind later; because if you do, oh, I’ll feel guilty, so guilty, and I won’t, ever, be able to make it up to you…

He couldn’t hear me, of course, but he saw me, saw my lips, and his muscles knotted long enough to hold his upper body away from the humming blade, a few inches above the point where he would fall, and I moved gently, not too quickly, and lifted the slippery, ugly razor free. I flicked it off. The muscles over his ribs were tight and absolutely still. He hung in the balance. I didn’t think I could hold him up if he started to fall.

“Don’t move,” I said. “Don’t move.” I put the razor down carefully, not wanting to make a sudden move, a noise that might startle him out of his stasis. His skin gleamed with sweat. I knelt, braced one hand on the floor, and slid the other around his waist. If he wanted to, he could throw us both off, and we’d be sucked away in seconds and drowned, if we weren’t crushed first. He doesn’t know you’re a van de Oest, I told myself. I could feel him trembling.

I heaved him away from the edge.

He lay on his back, limbless, staring at the ceiling. I had the urge to apologize.

I got up and hit the stud that closed up the floor. I could hear his harsh breathing. I picked up the pile of limbs, carried them to his side. “Which one do you want first, right or left?”

“Right.”

We were both very matter-of-fact. There was no other way to be. I reconnected the prosthesis to his right shoulder, then turned away politely while he snapped on the other arm and then the legs. When he had put his skinny back on, I squatted down beside him and handed him the razor. He slipped it under his left cuff with a practiced motion. Carrying a razor was a habit. I wondered how I would have felt, before, if I’d known that.

His eyes were brown, opaque. “You shouldn’t have stopped me.”

“Why?”

For a moment I thought he would not bother to answer. Then he looked at me for a long time, and asked, “Who am I?”

“Paolo Cruz.”

“No. I’m nobody, a nothing.” So bitter. “The only person who cares that I exist is my brother. He brought us, me and my sister, here from Venezuela, to lobby for our rights. But my sister died, and no one will listen to me or my brother. ‘It was all settled long ago,’ the courts say. They’ve given us nothing. Except these plastic arms and legs. And maybe that’s all me and people like me are worth.”

No, I wanted to say. But why should he believe me? Who had there ever been to tell him any different?

“To the courts and the medical industry, to those rich people who caused all this in the first place, I’m one of the disposable masses. Not even wholly human.” He thrust his arm at me. “Feel that.”

“Feel it!”

It was soft and warm and dry. Pleasant.

“Just once, I thought, just once I wanted to be someone to those people, those Hepples and van de Oests. If I killed myself here, if my body fell into the water, they would have to turn everything off. They’d lose money. They would know who I was, me, Paolo Cruz, the man made of plastic.”

I did not know how to tell him that all his death would have accomplished was a minor inconvenience to this shift: his corpse would have been caught on the sieves, easily fished out, and the blood would only have provided more food for the microbes. Unless, of course, he’d thrown in his prostheses, which might have been tough enough to foul the machinery.

We were quiet for a while, then I stood up. “Are you coming back to work? Maybe Magyar will find a way to get your job back.”

“No. I don’t want to be a nobody in this place anymore.”

“But with what I’m teaching you, you could…” I shut up. I could not give him self-esteem. That was something he had to find for himself.

“What will you do?”

“I’ll think of something.” He smiled humorlessly, walked over to the doorway marked Emergency Exit, and opened it. Alarms rang. “I hope Hepple thinks all the pipes have burst.”

He left without a backward glance. After a moment, I closed the door behind him. The alarms shut off abruptly.

When I got back to the troughs, I found it had only been twenty minutes since I had gone with Magyar to Hepple’s office. I went about my work mechanically.

Magyar appeared. She was hushed. “Who used that door?” She looked around. “Cruz?”

“He’s gone.”

She swore. “And I got him his job back, too.”

“I told him you would.” Though I hadn’t believed it. “How did you manage it?”

“I put myself on the line, just confronting Hepple.” She was trying to explain something. “I took a few risks. I put you on the line, too.”

I suddenly felt very tired. “What have you done?”

“I told him he couldn’t fire Cruz on such shaky grounds, especially since a government employee had witnessed the whole affair.”

“You told him—”

Magyar’s eyes gleamed. “I didn’t actually say anything straight out, just hinted around. And then he said something about you spouting regulations at him, and got thoughtful. Then he said that, yes, maybe he had been hasty, and the downsizing would have to be looked at carefully and systematically. So Paolo is back in. Or would have been. And Hepple thinks we’ve got his balls in a press, so everything’s back to normal.”

It wasn’t. It never would be, not when I kept seeing that slack, empty look in Paolo’s eyes, hearing him say I am nothing.

“What’s the matter? I mean, I didn’t expect handsprings, but thanks wouldn’t be out of order. Or are you just upset that I told Hepple you weren’t quite who you seem to be? Which is something we still haven’t cleared up.”

“I’m not a government employee,” I said wearily. “I’m not after your job. I don’t mean anyone any harm at all. I’m glad you wanted to help Paolo, but as you can see, it’s too late. All I want…” I felt dizzy for a minute. “I want…” I wanted to tell her that all I wanted was to do my job and be left alone, but I found myself crying. “He tried to kill himself. He took off his… and the razor…”

Magyar took my arm tightly. I thought she was worried I would fall into the trough, or run amok, or something, but she just said, “Don’t rub your eyes. You don’t know what’s on your hands.”