SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

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Dick has started being rougher in his re-enactments; I doubt these are memories, no, I’m sure they are not, because these versions are conflicting and contradictory, and things happen that I know never really happened. Brigitte/Sandra is not always the one leaving him any more—sometimes he leaves her, sometimes she dies. Sometimes he kills her, chokes her. Or, he pretends to. He acts disinterested afterwards, says these are only stories he makes up and likes to play out; but I know, any reporter knows there are no disinterested stories, least of all the ones we tell ourselves.

Brigitte says she doesn’t mind, she doesn’t feel, remember? It’s her job, she says. I’m still not convinced. I find myself in my reporter’s role nonetheless, taking everything in, observing, reluctant to participate. This is not how the game is played, I tell myself.

I watch the nacre spread on her skin, covering more and more each day, like a disease of unbearable beauty.

"How did you end up in this mess, anyway?" Dick asked me yesterday. "I never thought they’d send a woman."

I hit him hard on the arm and he laughed. "I choose not to be insulted," I said. "Anyway, I needed this. Badly. Went through a rough patch a while back and was out of circulation for some time. So when I went back to my boss and begged, he gave me the case nobody else would take."

Dick stopped fiddling with his cigarettes and turned to me. I had his full attention now, and I wasn’t sure I wanted it. I shouldn’t have said anything.

"Rough? How rough?" he asked.

I said nothing.

"You know you can talk to me, right?"

I thought of his hands around Brigitte’s neck. What happened to you, Richard? You were a tender boy, back then.

"It’s been a while, Dick. I’m sorry."

I think I hurt his feelings, but he tried not to show it. And at that moment I realized I didn’t mind. Hurting him. I didn’t mind at all.

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The second meditation rehearses the actual death process.

Engage now in this series of yogas, modelled on death.

First, the body becomes very thin, the limbs barely held together. You will feel that the body is sinking into the earth. Your sight becomes blurry and obscured. You may see mirages. Do not believe them. The body loses its lustre.

Then, all the fluids in the body dry up. Saliva, sweat, urine, blood dry up. Feelings of pleasure and pain dry with them. You may feel like smoke.

Then, you can no longer hear. You cannot digest food or drink. You do not remember your name, or the names of the ones you knew and loved. You cannot smell. You may not be able to inhale, but you will be able to exhale.

Then, the ten winds of the body move to your heart. You will no longer inhale or exhale. You will not be able to taste. You will not care. The root of your tongue will turn blue. You may feel like a lamp about to go out.

Then, nothing.

Then, nothing.

Then, nothing. The ten winds dissolve. The indestructible drop at the heart is all that remains.

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"Why do you let him treat you like that?" I ask her almost reflexively one day. I regret it right away. Am I blaming her for the way he treats her? Shouldn’t I be blaming him?

She thinks about it for a while, then shrugs.

"It’s my job," she says. "I don’t have a choice. Some things are in my programming."

"Yes, but some aren’t."

She looks me in the eyes, fixes her gaze there, and she seems less human than ever before. People don’t look at others like that. "I’m a whore," she states.

"You are more than a whore. It’s not who you are. It’s simply what you do."

"See, you got it backwards. What we are for is who we are. A hammer is what a hammer does. Would you ever use a hammer to screw a screw or cut a piece of wood?"

"Just a tool, then."

"That’s right. Just a tool."

"Doesn’t my saying that offend you?"

"Do you think it should?"

I don’t say anything.

"Why?" she continues. "We are all tools for something. Aren’t you? It’s not an android thing. It’s an existential thing."

I lower my eyes.

She leans over and touches my shoulder. "I’m sorry," she says. "Sometimes empathy is difficult for me. We don’t feel anything, you know. No feelings."

She seems sincere, but I don’t believe her; I tell her so. "Some people say the nacre is a byproduct of the things you do feel that were not programmed. Just like the nacre wasn’t, and yet, there it is."

She shrugs again. "My programming allows me to imitate feeling and to learn from other people’s perceptions of me. No one knows what the nacre is, or what it does." She pauses for a bit. Then she adds: "Perhaps it’s a form of rust. Tools do rust, don’t they?"

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I’m sitting by the window, looking out. The smog seems heavier today. Darker, too. I think it’s the colour of rot. I wish I could see past it. I wish I could see.

Brigitte comes home—I notice there is a bright new patch of nacre under her right eye. She smiles, like she always does.

"Get dressed," she says. "I need to show you something."

When I’m ready to go, she holds out her hand closed in a fist. Slowly, she uncurls her fingers and reveals a pearl resting on her palm. It takes me a couple of seconds to realize what it is, and then I look at her, trying to figure out what she’s planning.

"Put this under your tongue, Aliki," she says. "You’ll see. You’ll understand."

I put the pearl in my mouth and we set out into the smog and that corpse of a city.

We are at the main square. The pearl is still dissolving under my tongue; it tastes sweet and tangy and makes my heart beat irregularly. I see the city pillar towering over us—round and bulging at the bottom, thinning as it reaches for the sky. The top disappears into the thick layers of smog above. Its marble surface emits a subdued light, like a fading beacon.

"It was built hundreds of years ago as a mystical axis around which the city would be born, you know," Brigitte says. "The story of its construction is now largely ignored and forgotten, but spirit mediums still gather here sometimes. They consider it a source of power for those who commune with the dead. It is said that when the foundation for the pillar was laid, a fosse was dug around it. They brought every young pregnant slave girl they could find, slit their throats and threw them in there to die, and through their death empower the pillar to protect the city."

I look at the base of the pillar and realize I am standing on top of where the trench would have been, if that story were true. The pillar starts glowing brighter and brighter and I look up to see if the sun has somehow penetrated the smog. I feel the ground shake under my feet, then give, and I fall into the trench. The slave girls are there, all around me, with their blood still seeping into the earth, their fetuses still dying in their wombs.

This city is built on gore. The shiny marble, a tombstone laid over history. I see the streets turn into veins. I see students parade through the city with what corpses they could salvage; they carry them on their shoulders, their friends, their classmates, their lovers, displaying them like a mute witness to the regime’s moral order. And then these students are shot down or snatched off the streets, the corpses torn from their arms. They are strung on trees and shot, or burnt alive, or worse. Of this, we will not speak.