Peter Liu - Bald New World

“What are you doing to her?” I asked, knowing full well that her fate was sealed. I thought about the package she’d analyzed for Larry and wondered why she’d been stumped by it as she worked here.

The hallways, aside from the bodies, were like something from the gallery of a rich taxidermist. There was the severed head of a panda on the wall as well as a horse suspended in liquid, hair flowing in swirling fractals. There were creatures I didn’t recognize, ones that had gone extinct like the chimpanzee, buffalo, and yeti. Voltaire’s hands were folded behind his back, his armor giving him the bearing of a general surveying the battle scene. Eight researchers were hung in a hallway. Fifteen corpses were piled on top of one another. Everywhere, his family greeted him with a reverence that verged on worship. His authority was unquestioned.

“Why are you keeping me alive?” I asked.

“I told you, we have a lot in common.” He turned to me. “If I was going to kill you, I wouldn’t have gone through the trouble of saving your life.”

One hallway led into another and another. The corridors went on seemingly forever. There were computer terminals at every corner, glass walls with laboratories where they presumably studied hair. Several of the machines resembled the telescopes they pointed at space, only in reverse, examining strands of hair. We came to a very dark hall filled with tiny compartments that could have been lockers. There were approximately a hundred on either side. The doors had latches and slits as windows. It looked like a space where they kept monkeys and bigger rodents.

“This is where I grew up,” Voltaire stated. “I spent the first eight years of my life in locker number 15.”

He opened it. If I rolled up into a ball, it would barely fit me. I couldn’t imagine being inside there for ten minutes, much less eight years.

“They stuck you in there?”

“With masks,” he added, smiling. “To make sure we breathed pure air. They fed us intravenously, cleaned us with a spray inside the unit.” He reached his hand inside and felt for a module that had tube ports and a sprinkler on it.

“Why’d they do this?” I asked.

“To track down the cause of the Great Baldification. They had to know the culprit. Was it solar spikes, pollution, or junk food?” Voltaire posed, a caustic edge to his questioning. “They had to study it and more importantly, recreate it. Twenty years ago, Larry’s father, the senior Dr. Chao found out our father grew hair when no one else did. He wanted to know why. So he had my father impregnate hundreds of women who gave birth and had their babies taken away so they could be raised in this blind hell. I would have preferred brimstone and fire to being stuck in a black void. Our deceased father had a skin condition that prevented him from going out in the sun. He’d spent all of his life away from it. But whenever he went outside, his hair would start falling out.”

“The sun?”

“There were others who had never been in the sun. How come they were bald? The senior Dr. Chao tried everything on us. Many died. So many. And for what?”

I could not imagine what their lives had been like.

“When I turned five, every month or so, they’d take us out, cut our hair until we were bald, then send us back in. That’s how I came to know there were others like me. Any who disobeyed or were troublesome disappeared in the next hair cycle and we’d never see them again.”

We had both grown up prisoners in our own homes, subjected to cruelties others could not possibly understand. In degrees, his was by far the more extreme, but it was a fury I empathized with.

“How did you get out?” I asked.

“We were eventually released,” Voltaire said.

“Someone had a change of heart?”

“You could say that.”

Voltaire led me out of the hall, down the corridor, up a flight of stairs, until we arrived at a huge space that could have been a warehouse. There were thousands of glass cages set up in rows as though it were an aquarium. But there weren’t fish within. There were scalps of heads, hair growing from them and swaying like plants underwater. Mechanical arms with clippers and harvesters covered the ceiling, wires and tracks giving the arms full mobility. I stepped closer to make sure I was seeing right.

“Dr. Chao never found out what exactly caused the Great Baldification. But he found a way to recreate hair in perpetuity. These are the heads of my brothers and sisters who sacrificed their lives so that Chao Toufa could produce the best wigs in the world,” Voltaire declared. “The doctor kept the skin producing hair even without the rest of the body attached by releasing timed doses of synthetic hormones into the preserving solution at freezing temperatures.”

“What happened to the bodi—?”

“Terminated,” Voltaire said to me. “After he discovered this new method, he had no need for us. So he sent us out into the world five years ago like sheep to be devoured by the wolves.”

“But that would risk exposing your secret.”

“He assumed our hair would fall out when we were back in the sun. But it didn’t. Still, it wasn’t a big preoccupation for him. He was dying of stomach cancer.”

“So what happened?”

“We slipped off his radar. As we had been sent out with nothing to fend for ourselves, we had to carve out our own paths,” Voltaire said. He furrowed his brows and stared at one of the heads in the tank. “Beauvoir, take him upstairs and wait for us.”

They were going to do something here. Destroy it? Obliterate it? Salvage the heads? Commemorate all those they’d lost? There were so many heads and so much hair. I tried to get it out of my mind that those scalps once belonged to people.

I followed Beauvoir out of the chamber.

“You grew up in one of these too?” I asked.

“Yes.”

I grimaced, thinking of her being stuffed into a compartment, tubes sticking out of her body, used for experimentation so they could provide wigs for strangers.

“You will help our cause?” she asked.

“I doubt there’s anything I can do.”

“You’re the owner of Chao Toufa.”

“In name only.”

“Names are important,” she said.

“Why are all of you named after authors?”

“I don’t know. One of the researchers gave us all our names. Maybe she loved literature. Do you like literature?”

“I usually watch the movie versions of famous books,” I admitted.

“Me too. Too bad there won’t be any new movies for a while.”

We entered the corridor with all the animal heads. Above, I saw the fresh body of Dr. Asahi hanging from a rope. Her feet were twitching and her eyes were crossed with blood. Had she been confused by the package because she had not known the group of them had been sent out to fend for themselves? Not that it mattered with her corpse hanging from above. I felt terribly sorry. Then I thought about those scalps underground and my pity dissipated into conflicted aversion.

“There’s something I want you to know about me,” Beauvoir said.

“What?”

“I did things. Things a proper man might not appreciate about a lady. I did it so we could survive,” she said.

“I understand.”

“Do you?”

It pained me to think of it. I knew she was much tougher than I was. Anyone who survived down here had to be. I was in no place to judge her for anything. “You forget what I endured during the cricket matches? You do what you have to do.”

“That’s what you did?”

“That’s what everyone does.”

She nodded. “You were married before.”

“Yeah.”

“Larry told Voltaire you hadn’t made love to a woman since your ex-wife.”

“He told him that?!” I exclaimed, embarrassed and incredulous.