Premee Mohamed - These Lifeless Things

April 28

Today we dug up bones in the Botanical Garden.

I was briefly, reflexively confused: How did these get here? But what a question. People just die wherever they die.

V. stopped digging too, and we studied our findings: brown, glistening, not white and dry like in the movies—for a moment I thought my eyes had tricked me, and we had found a layer of mulch. Or wood, a sculpture carved by some macabre but competent art student. Bone fragments fell on the trays at my feet, the strawberry runners we scavenged from the wall yesterday.

I just wanted something sweet. I haven’t had anything sweet for a long time.

V. poked the skull with his boot and said: The grass in cemeteries, they say, stays green even in drought, because it drinks from the bodies of the dead.

I said, Who says that? That’s disgusting.

He laughed, and I put my hand on his warm back in the black shirt—he’s strong, there’s still muscle along with the bone—and I thought, We could make love right here! In the sun! Right here under the gaze of God! Who, in this dead city, would stop us?

But, well.

We planted the strawberries, and more beans, and weeded the potatoes. In the fussy, preciously-laid-out Mediterranean gardens we scraped aside the white gravel, laying bare the black fabric below, in another SOS sign. Very satisfying, that noise.

No one’s coming, I said.

Still, said V.

The soil rumbled and churned under our boots, not with the vigour of spring seedlings, nor worms or springtails or mice. Faceted, iridescent eyes watched us. A tiny tentacle lunged up and tugged impishly at my laces; V. spun at once and killed it with a blow from the spade.

I thought the soil at least had been spared, he said.

We’ll see who spares who if they touch my strawberries, I said.

A good day’s work. No sentinels seen. About half the remaining trees have turned, but watched us rather than attacking. We scrambled back to safety just before sundown, sweaty and thirsty as always, and joyously locked the doors and pulled the shutters behind us. Dark now. Something scrabbling on the street below.

“EMERSON.”

The botanical gardens. The botanical gardens. Quick, where is that on the map? Pull it up, check the drone photos…

“Emerson?”

I look up, dazed. “Wha?”

“We’re just breaking for lunch, if you want to come.”

I lower the book to my lap with trembling hands. I should be wearing gloves. No. Wait. The scanner can filter out my fingerprints. But that means I’ll have to wait until I—

“Em!”

Winnie stoops and taps my wrist briskly with her sharp, painted fingernail. The pain is bright and minute as a wasp sting, and brings me back to myself, back to the cool gloom, the ceaseless breeze. The patch of sunlight I have been sitting in all morning has become shadow, violet and even scarlet around the edges from the dust in the air.

“Are you all right?”

“I found… I think I found,” I correct myself professionally, “I think I may have found a… a primary source.”

“Christ! Are you sure?”

“No. I don’t know.” I’m cradling the book, I realize, in both hands, close to my torso, as if I’ve picked up a small animal. “There’s no date. The book itself was published fifty years pre-Setback. But it talks about the sentinels. About things in the dirt…”

Winnie watches me for a minute, her face politely interested but dubious. She’s a forensic osteologist, or whatever her department is calling them now—the dropdown menu on the funding form didn’t have our real titles, but we had to put something in to get the money—and she deals with trace chemicals, microscopic fragments, strands of hair, things that can be measured and tested. Journals don’t fall under the purview of what she considers ‘real science.’ “Well, that’s great,” she says, her voice as sincere as she can make it. “We’re meeting back at the pod,” she says eventually. “In 14C. I’ll keep yours hot.”

“Thanks.”

When she’s gone, her microboard silent along the rubble-strewn street, I set the book down where I found it, and don the gloves in the back pocket of my cruise vest, and pick it up again. My heart is beating very fast.

The rest of the team might not help me. But I’m already thinking: Beg Winnie to check the gardens for bone fragments. Ask Victor about the trees. What does ‘turned’ mean? It’s too early in the year to be referring to fall.

This could be my whole degree. My whole life .

May 1

I’ve taken to carrying this book in an inner pocket, tucking the pencil inside it so I don’t lean over and puncture a lung (not that I can keep it that sharp, ha ha). What a funny thing to do, I keep thinking. I’ve made it a substitute for my phone. An object of both comfort and utility, like the plastic dollies that N. used to drag about when he was a little boy, the younger brother who never had a real baby to cuddle.

Now, I cradle the analogous-but-not-quite flat rectangle in my hands at spare moments, softly lit through dirty windows, and I imagine I could cry out, receive a reply within seconds, hear how people are doing. Loved ones. Friends. The world.

The world.

If this is to be the gradual petering out of what I thought of as the world, then so be it. But I am fiercely and adamantly and unshakeably and secretly sure that it is not.

I can’t tell my theory to V., he’ll laugh at me. But just as Hiroshima did not happen everywhere, just as the Shoah did not happen everywhere, just as the Great Hunger did not happen everywhere, I feel certain that there are places which were spared the Invasion.

Certain that… humanity, progress, evolution, whatever we were doing at the time (whatever that was, even though it may have been failing), continues somewhere, and that they who go on elsewhere have been prevented from helping us due to external circumstances of perhaps politics or finances or logistics or weaponry limitations. That they are not waiting for the sieges to lift and then to come count the dead, but that they are making preparations to rescue us.

Certain that one morning, we will awaken to find the rest of the world singing songs of gladness and coming over the horizon in huge, monster-proof helicopters…

…but They’re not really monsters, are They?

They’re something else.

At any rate, writing in here gives me something else to think about; and it lets me imagine that, once we’re rescued, my words could join the words of others like me.

I don’t want to say remnants. I don’t want to say leftovers. I think I want to say ‘survivors,’ but… not if I don’t survive.

Perhaps someone will read this and figure out what happened, because God knows I won’t, and can’t; I’m too busy.

We were trailed by sentinels today, who must have been watching us in the garden; their unevenly-scaled bodies were covered in white gravel from where they scrabbled in our sign. As night fell and we ran for cover, I wounded (I think) one statue, but did not kill it. One of the uglier ones, its twisted face scattered with spiraled teeth and eyes, shoulders humped with brass muscle. I would not have wanted to see that one begin to move.

Hang on. Something outside, not on cobblestones but wall. Something is breaking apart the plaster. Bastards!