Kiini Salaam - Ancient, Ancient

“Keep tight! What were you thinking?”

I look at the person speaking to me and almost gag. I look away, but a glance around the room sickens me further. The room is crawling with mangled people. No facial feature is where it should be—limbs are attached at odd angles on all the wrong parts of the body. I force the muscles in my face to be still. Then I look again. It is a man speaking to me, was a man. Now I don’t know what he is. He has eyes on either side of his mouth, and his nose sits at a violent tilt. The space where his eyes should be is covered with a huge, lumpy scar. Even as I am battling revulsion, I can see that his oddly-placed eyes are flicking appraising glances, sizing me up.

I look around again. Through the narrow mesh platform beneath my feet, I see more of them—the mutilated—packed in like cockroaches. There are so many of them that they look like rashes or rust corroding the metal walls. Besides the revolting people, everything in the room is metal—metal walls, metal poles, metal mesh flooring.

When I look up, a few droplets of wetness fall into my eyes. I shake my head and blink it away. I look up again. A clump of blistered kids are wedged between the overhead poles and the ceiling. The realization rises in me slowly: I must be disfigured too. I look down at my body. I see my shoulder just beneath my chin, and my arm jutting out from where my chest should be. What kinds of freaks are we?

When next I look at the man, the air around me seems unstable. The fearsome roar that rings through the room starts to echo in my ears. My eyelids droop, and my muscles start to go slack. The man opens his mouth, a tiny wet hand emerges. He wipes the bottom of my nose with it. A moldy scent bursts in my sinuses, and my eyes pop wide open.

“You gonna make it? Ain’t no short trip!”

I nod mutely, revolted and relieved.

“You have your things?” he asks again.

I shrug. He squints at me. I can tell he thinks I’m a waste of time.

“You know about the things, right?”

I shrug again, this time nodding.

He turns his head and opens his mouth. Out comes the hand again. It feels along the pole we’re hanging on. He picks at something flat that’s stuck there and rips it off. I hadn’t noticed it before, but only one of his arms ends with a hand, the other ends with a foot. He only has one standing leg, and it’s keeping him balanced on the platform beneath us.

He waves it under my nose. It’s an old tattered label.

“Mmmm-mmm!”

It takes me a few seconds to realize he can’t talk and hand me the label at the same time. I grab the label.

“Not going to ask. Why you don’t know what we’re doing here is none of my concern. How you got on the transport without knowing about the things ain’t my trouble.” He looks around. “But you better learn fast. There ain’t no return trips. At the end of this, either you’ll get out or you’ll die.”

I can tell by the hard edges of his words that he meant to scare. Instead I’m thrilled. Could this finally be the end?

“You need three things. Three. You got them?”

I began to feel around my body, awkwardly learning how to use my rotated arms.

“Pocket the label.”

“What?”

The guy’s eyes roll up like I’m useless. “Pocket the label, it’s your pass.”

I look at the label. It’s grimy and stiff. Though it’s ripped I can read something on it: “Regiment Green: Disrespect on a cellular level.” Reaching around my hip, feeling for my back pocket, my hand catches on an opening in my clothes. It’s a pocket. I drop the label in and feel around the rest of my clothes. I’ve got pockets all over.

I poke around in the pockets, unsure of what I’m looking for. My fingers happen upon something stiff in the fourth pocket. I pull it out—a shiny black feather. The man makes a weird fluttering sound with his mouth. I imagine that wet hand flapping against his moist jaws.

“Don’t show me. Don’t show anybody except Him when you get there. Got it?”

I nod and keep feeling around, but the rest of the pockets are empty. After I check all my pockets twice, I realize that my fingers are covered with grime. I put my hand back in a pocket and pinch at the bottom. When I draw my hand out, there’s something grainy sticking to my fingertips. I hold my hand up to my face—desert sand. I start grabbing pinches of sand wherever I can find it.

“Tighten!” the guy yells.

I grab on with two hands. The transport dips, then turns sharply. My feet fly off the platform, and a burning flares across my palms where they rub against the overhead pipe.

I hear a yell, then two bodies drop down from above. The yelling fades and is replaced by a sinister hissing. The air fills with smoke, and a high-pitched wailing rings out.

“Don’t lose your grip,” the guy mutters.

“What’s down there?”

“Engine.”

Fear bubbles up in my throat, but I choke it back down. I focus on the impossible task of filling one of my pockets with sand. When I’ve piled all the sand I can grab into one pocket, I let out a relieved exhalation.

But the guy breaks into my relief. “You need three things. Two’s no good. He won’t send you if you don’t have three.”

My thoughts run around my mind in panicked loops. Who is this person and where will he send me? Will this take me home? More moisture falls on me from above. I’m suddenly aware of my armpits and my crotch. They are soaking wet, my entire torso is wet—I am terrified to the bone.

Suddenly I know what my third thing will be.

“What if I want to bring liquid? What can I hold it in?”

The guy doesn’t answer. He throws his head back, barks something guttural and fast. One of the children wedged in overhead shimmies forward on the pole. He almost cracks my knuckles in the process, but I don’t cry out. He reaches up, grabs something white and cup-shaped from the ceiling. He brings it to his mouth quickly, gulping something down. Finds another cup-shaped thing from the ceiling and grabs it. He passes them down to the guy, whose head is thrown back, lips spread wide as the wet hand is outstretched waiting for the cups. When he has them, he flicks them at me.

“Won’t last forever. You better hope it holds out till we get to the Man.”

I nod. I see him staring at me curiously. I tilt my head forward, hold the cup underneath the tip of my nose, let my sweat drip into it.

“Tighten!”

I throw my hand over the pole and yank on it with my wrist. We careen backward this time. I lose all my sweat but I hold on to the cup. It takes me three more tries, but I finally fill the cup.

Something like admiration creeps into the guy’s eyes.

“Pass the empty,” he says.

I pass it. With a flick of his wet fingers, he turns it upside down and holds it out to me. I fit the cup filled with sweat to the empty one. He pinches the edges of the two cups with his tiny hand. I take the cups back and drop them into my pocket.

A ghostly sensation washes through my body. At first I think it’s relief, but then I feel it fluttering in my chest. I look at my guide with new eyes, eyes that are probably now as wet as my skin. I haven’t caught a glimpse of the outside, but I know from my brief time in the bowels of this machine, this world isn’t a pretty place. Surrounded by all these damaged cells, in the middle of this ocean of desperation, my guide suddenly seems holy. Before I can hold it back, reverence and gratitude pour out of my face. My emotions register in his eyes, and he turns away.

After my flush of emotion, “Tighten!” is the only word he says to me for the rest of the trip. In the absence of his gaze, the balancing act becomes routine; I find myself oddly acclimated to periodic peril. Soon I’m dozing off between veers and drops as the drone of the engine soaks through me. By the time the engine room shudders and slows, I have become what everyone else is: a jumpy, sweaty fugitive—frightened, yet determined to survive.