May 8, ’94 (12 Days After the Fire)
“That isn’t a woman’s crime,” said the old doctor, who already doubted the guard’s report of events.
The guard sucked his lower lip. “I’m only repeating what is written, sir.”
“I suppose you are.” The doctor checked his watch, because wall clocks here were known to be deliberately made unreliable, differing from each other by hours. It was, by the true time on the doctor’s wrist, ten seconds before eleven minutes after six in the evening. The sun would still be shining, given the time of year, but the wire-grid windows, cut into thick concrete banks, had been made of such dismal glass they held this place in perpetual twilight. The space had been designed to look, and feel, halfway to death. Sooty convex mirrors hung everywhere, and the air smelled of black mold.
“You should also know that she tried to kill one of us.”
Dr. Klein opened his notebook and prepared a pen. “That’s something. Who?”
“The last doctor. The one whose job you’re now in.”
“Dr. Bugg, you mean?”
“She tore his face to shreds. Like an animal.”
Dr. Klein wrote, Dr. Bugg—facial lacerations. “This happened...?
“Two days ago. We got her calmed down and were able to restrain her.” The guard pointed to a narrow door. “There’s been no point in feeding her, because she’s so sick.”
“Madhouse fever?”
“Uh-huh.”
The doctor stepped back. “And you still needed her to be tied down?”
“There’s hatred in her eyes like I’ve never seen.”
“I bet,” said the doctor. In ordinary circumstances, a woman so deathly ill and restrained would be dangerous to no one, but if his suspicions were correct, the hazard was severe, even now. “I’ll go see her.”
“It might smell bad in there.”
“I’ve been a doctor for more than fifty years. I guarantee you, I’ve smelled worse.”
The guard looked at him as if the doctor were speaking a foreign language.
“It’s my job,” the doctor added. “A grot is a grot.”
“Indeed,” the guard said as he walked to the door and jiggled the key in the lock. “A grot is a grot.”
“What is this young woman’s name?”
“We don’t know. When we took her in, she was calling herself Nicole. Later, she insisted we call her Beatrixa.” The guard took a slow breath. “I suppose that sort of thing is why she’s here.”
“Right.”
“We call her A28.”
“Is that the day she came in? Two days after the fire?”
“Correct.”
The doctor wrote, Admitted 4/28, and circled the date. Involuntary. He realized this last note had been unnecessary, because while it was technically possible for a person to come to a facility like this on their own volition, no one ever did. He opened the door, and light spotted her face as she lay diagonally, knees bent, in a space no larger than four feet square.
Her eyes opened, bristling like those of a scared animal, and he was reminded of the final lucidity some of his dying patients had experienced, but there was no lucidity here.
“Let me out,” she screamed as she tore at her ratty black hair. “Let me the fuck fuck fuck fuck out of here! Let me the fucking fuck—”
“Quiet,” the doctor whispered. He would have preferred to close the door, but the cell did not humanely fit one person, let alone two. “I’m not here to hurt you.”
“Quiet?” A28 bit uselessly at her straitjacket. Her legs smashed against her irons. “Nothing here is quiet, and who the fuck are you? Nothing is quiet, and who the fuck are—”
The doctor crouched, despite the protest of his aged knees. “I will answer you, but please tell me who you are.”
“The outside…” A28’s blue eyes darted. “I’m Nicole,” she whispered. “Nicole Eris Beatrixa.”
“It’s good to meet you, Nicole. You should call me Dr. Klein.” They were both, he felt certain, using false names.
“The outside is the inside, Dr. Klein.”
He wrote, The outside is the inside.
Nicole, or A28, or whatever she was, continued. “The world out there, my friend… it’s as bad as in here. The true madhouse is the Company. Killed the people in my head, it did.”
“I would like to ask you about—”
She shook her head, then glared at the guard.
The doctor looked up. “Could you leave us?”
“She’s dangerous, sir.”
“Old age is dangerous, medically speaking, and yet I persist in being old.”
“I need you to say that...”
“I release you from all liability, civil and criminal, in the execution of my request for privacy..”
“Very well.” The guard walked away.
“Farisa’s fault.” A28 sat up. She had been tied up well—restraining women was one of the few things a person could trust the Global Company to do well—and used what little mobility she had to rock in place. Her blue eyes seemed bright enough to cast a shadow. “Farisa’s fault, yes. It always was. The drought, the fire, the dying, all the dying. All her fault, yes, all hers. Down to the road, it’s all her doing.”
“I understand.” Dr. Klein wrote, Farisa’s fault, which he underlined twice. “Have you ever met this Farisa?”
A28 blinked again and shook her head, then closed her eyes.
“I hope you feel better soon,” said the doctor as he closed the door. Whoever this woman was, and whatever she had done, she didn’t deserve the fate coming toward her. The unsanitary conditions here would cause even the best medical treatments to fail, and within two days her kidneys would shut down. It would be best, in such conditions, that the drugs used to calm her built up to such a dose as would cause a lethal sleep.
On the way out, Dr. Klein bid the guard goodnight.
“Plonkered, isn’t she?”
Professionalism forbade him to comment, but to respond by saying nothing would itself be a comment, so the old doctor asked, “Who is Farisa?”
“Dunno.” The guard spun a coin on his desk, then caught it mid-spin. “She says that name all the time.”
“Do you know anyone by that name?”
“No.” The guard laughed. “Happy that, no. Isn’t that the name of the girl who—? Never mind.” The guard drew an imaginary seal across his lips. “Uh, let me hire you a carriage.”
“No need. I can do that for myself.”
“Are you sure? When the weather’s bad—”
“Yes, I am sure,” said the doctor as he stepped out into the street. South Exmore’s buildings had set the sun before its time. The broken gas lamps seemed to radiate darkness.
“Merrick Klein,” he said to himself. He hadn’t done the best job of choosing a false name, his real one being Merrick Kapel.
(“The outside is the inside, Dr. Klein.”)
Rain was falling; after months of drought, there had been nine straight days of rain and windy cold that made it feel more like March than May. The covered cabs were, indeed, unavailable, because during bad weather the Company could be relied upon to restrict their number and increase fares, thus profits. Five miles from home, he would have walked there on a warmer evening, but seventy-nine was too old an age to roll the dice on this kind of lung-filling damp cold. The coffeehouses of South Exmore, once ideal places to wait out these sorts of spring downpours, had all closed long ago, too. He waited under an awning.
Two blocks away, a factory had let its workers out early. This meant their wages had been docked, and they would be furious, and he was worried that one might be inclined to take the shortfall out on an old man, but they paid him no notice. Instead, they went into a tavern where they could spend their pay on drunk oblivion—a void in which the denizens of the Company’s world loved to spend time because a void, by definition, could not be owned, not even by the Company.
Merrick had grown to view today’s young with pity more than contempt. There had been an age for the latter, when it seemed the Company could still be fought but the young were not fighting hard enough, but it had passed. Today’s young had no memory of the world before. The idea that people who possessed pieces of paper had all rights to rule, for no other reason, struck them as fixed, like physics. There were, among his patients, a second and third generation of people for whom it had always been illegal to produce one’s own food. He and his neighbors had once grown tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, and watermelons in their gardens, dividing their surpluses, expecting nothing in return but conversation. Food and fortune, in his time, weren’t held with a white thumb. That was not the case in today’s world. Vegetable gardens were rare, and one couldn’t even get most produce very often, and even Company men seemed thin on the cheeks.
The doctor suspected the guards in the Exmore madhouse were paid poorly. As in a women’s prison, authority was the wage. Eska verus ponotto; liberty is the salary.
Thunder rumbled. A cabriolet up the road got stuck in mud, causing traffic to back up behind it. The doctor feared this storm might be the kind to stick around for several hours, so he might as well find use for the time. He backed up against a concrete wall as he looked through Dr. Bugg’s notes.
You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.
A28—dark hair, five foot two, average/thin build, eyes brown.
The details matched, except for the eye color, and although Dr. Bugg’s work was often sloppy, even he wouldn’t have missed the vicious, icy blue of the woman’s eyes. The color had been unmistakable, even in the dusky madhouse light, and that—in retrospect—should have struck him as very odd...
The doctor, now ignoring the rain, ran back into the madhouse. “I need to see A28.”
The same guard stood in the lobby with crossed arms. “Visiting hours are over, sir.”
“She will die if I do not treat her.”
“I’ll need to speak to my superior officer.”
“A note from him.” Dr. Klein handed the guard a light-brown bill with 100 on it.
“It appears I have his permission. Let’s go.”
The doctor was more certain of his hunch that this woman was one of the most dangerous people alive right now, though at the moment she was sleeping. The stillness of her face brought forth the ancestral dignity of her features, adding credence to his theory.
“Eleven, twenty-nine, seven,” he whispered as he opened the door.
The girl’s eyes opened. Her eyes had reverted to their natural brown.
“Eleven, twenty-nine, seven,” he repeated.
She tilted her head back and laughed, mouth wide open, forehead pockmarked and grimy. “Six, two, six.” She cackled like a witch. “Six, two, six, and I know what I am! Six, two, fucking six, old man!”
He leaned in, handing her a vial of medicine. “Drink this.”
To his surprise, she showed no resistance or defiance; she drank the tincture.
“I will get you out of here tomorrow morning,” the doctor whispered. “I promise it. Sleep as well as you can.”
He closed the door, thankful to God that the Globbos had failed to determine her true identity.
The guard, who had returned to the lobby, was holding the hundred-grot bill up to an overhead electric light.
“Good night,” said the doctor to him.
“Uh-huh.”
“I hear your bosses are real cunts.”
The guard laughed. “You haven’t heard half.”
“Is it really true that they make you work twelve-hour shifts?”
“It is.”
“The old eight to eight,” Merrick said.
“Summer hours are seven to seven.”
“My sympathies,” said the doctor. “Seven to seven, plus some overlap at shift change, I assume.”
“We’re supposed to hang on an extra half hour, but they never pay us for that, so often we just leave.”
He wrote: Shift change 7 a.m. Come at 6:30 w/ backup.
He said goodnight to the guard, then left. He had no moral issues with what he was about to do, even while knowing he might be endangering the world. This “A28” would be in untreatable sepsis within a day and a half, at absolute most, if he did not break her out of here. A doctor’s job was to save lives, even if he had to reach into death’s lungs to do so. Whatever this woman had done, and whatever she might do after being freed, that was between her and God.
The rain had dulled to a sprinkle, so it did not take long to hail a ride home. He reflected on the oddity of his situation. He had made his reputation through caution and care; today, he had bet the safety of everything he cared about on a hunch, a reckless suspicion regarding the identity of a very sick woman, a patient in a madhouse whose teeth were chattering from the cold of another world.
#
I woke up at seven, seven years old.
No, that isn’t right. It can’t be. I’m older than seven. The stream reflects me, and I have a woman’s form.
I mean that I woke up at seven… seven this morning, I think, but it’s too hard to tell this deep in spring, because the light comes on so fast, it gets bright before there’s even a day at all. I woke up and I started running. I was running when I woke up. The smells, the dew, and the grass… they lift themselves up and pull your morning heart with them. It’s green out here, so green, and I could lie down on the grass like I’ve seen people do but I can’t do that because I did a bad thing and I’m in trouble. So much trouble, I have to keep running.
I’m from everywhere and nowhere. I’m important. I’m important in the… never mind, you won’t like me if I tell you too much.
I’m running, yes I am. I like the feeling of wind on my neck. My legs hurt but I can keep going if I pretend the pain is inside someone else, not me. I hardly feel it. I follow the eye of the cyclone till the storm breaks down, as storms always do. A storm has just one eye. One eye dies and two eyes live. Forty eyes live forever. Yva sen, yva sen.
My clothes are too tight and smell like someone else. My feet hurt more than feet should. I’m dodging puddles, but I don’t remember rain. These clothes are ugly, I don’t care about them. My legs are caked in mud. I’m dirty. I’m going to get in trouble. No, I’m alone. No one knows I’m dirty but me.
East, east is where I must go. I couldn’t cross the bog, so I hopped a plank turnpike. There were traveling actors ahead of me last night but I don’t know where they went. They were loud and broke glass bottles and I thought I might ask them for food, but I’m not supposed to bother strangers and I’m sure not supposed to be out with no shoes on. Clouds are building, building in the scary blue sky, and I’m not sure I’ll find a way around them.
Water and trees are all around me, and the swamp smells like a big fart, but once you’re used to the stink, it’s not a bad place. There’s beauty in a bog if you know where to look. Redbirds fly low, crossing my path. They look like rubies. If I had a long tongue like a frog, and if I were a frog that eats rubies, I’d be tempted to eat one.
“Moon, moon,” the train keeps saying. Trains long for night because they get to go faster. This one must be bored, it must be frustrated. Where’s it going? Where we are all going. Exmore, the city. I think that’s right. I have to keep saying this to myself or it doesn’t make sense. Every few minutes, the world blinks and I wake up again.
I just crossed over the a river. There’s someone I must meet there. It’s a sunny day but the factories are belching black wind. Concrete buildings and chipping paint, they all stretch ahead of me so far, farther than I can see. There is a garden wall with no garden, and on it someone has engraved a Vehu spiral-star and someone else painted an X over it and wrote the line beneath it: GET THE FUCK OUT.
That’s not very nice. I heard cities are mean. This one feels like it’s full of bad people, like it’s full of eyes, so many eyes.
#
The sense of being prey for something pulled her back to lucidity. Pull together, Farisa. This place is dangerous. She saw a man in gray let loose a black dog, who charged, and she braced for the running animal’s attack, but it darted past her and disappeared.
The river bridge was a quarter of a mile behind her. She recognized the crown-blue brick, obscured by soot at the street’s fringes but still visible in its middle third, for which Andor Street, Exmore’s main boulevard, was known. Of how much time had passed, or how she had come here, she had no recollection. She had been a teacher of something somewhere in some time seemed simultaneously like a second and like seven years ago. Aware that she was the only person running, she slowed her pace to match the world around her. Drunkards snoozed or shambled in the morning light that factory haze had turned orange. Nothing hurried in a place like this unless it was up to no good.
“137 Andor Street,” she said.
She had committed that address to memory enough times that, even in her mind’s disrepair, she knew it would be the safest place in Exmore. Vehu, the world’s first makers and breakers of codes, considered prime numbers lucky, and 137 was luckiest, so it tended to be used for a temple. She suspected she was far from the Vehu District now, though—no prayer flags or door amulets could be found on these low-slung, crumbling buildings.
As she came over a hill, a brown-clad city officer approached a fruit stand and took out a greengrocer’s knee with a truncheon. She stifled a gasp; to be upset by such a sight would make clear that she wasn’t from here. These were accepted sights in today’s cities, along with the graffiti, which existed at all tiers of skill and tastefulness.
The first specimen she encountered sat on a concrete wall of unclear provenance or purpose, in four words: Three Cheers to Beatrixa, inked in slightly garish but impressive blue calligraphy. Someone else had drawn in black and white a fisherman on a dock. Less excellent displays included misspelled curse words, overly stylized letters that appeared to be personal initials, and outlines of male genitalia. She kept walking. A quarter mile up the road, someone had written: Nicole plays down in the cave by the road—not the road by the cave that runs north of the grave. 4/24/94.
Farisa suspected this contribution to be recent, because the bright immature foliage on the trees suggested it was late April.
Beatrice Will Arrive, announced the boarded-up window of a house numbered 303, giving her the first indication of an address. The artistry and cleverness of the graffiti was improving as she worked her way north, but there didn’t seem to be much dialogue. Someone had rendered a prone man, recently deceased, with his soul rendered as a dove flying from the body, and several days of work, at a minimum, had been put into this. Someone else had painted an X over this in the same bleak color Globbo uniforms used.
On the story-high stoop of 241, leading up to a house that looked almost habitable, someone had written:
The streets are no Outhouse, our Mayor Munt said,
But the Rich have high windows and Shit on our Heads.
“Not bad, for the price of free,” said Farisa to herself. Mayor Munt. What misfortune, for someone to be so named.
She heard a bang. A Company sniper’s warning shot, at a drunkard whose collapse had blocked access to a textile factory, had caused the man to stir, but the sound had also put some haste into her, such that she was now in a pounding run until she caught sight of a junkyard with 229 painted over its archway, where she considered taking refuge, but a man with crossed arms blocked the entrance, shaking his head. The realization that she could slow down, that the fired shot had nothing to do with her, came gradually in the 210s.
At 193, Andor Street met a ridge spanned by about a hundred steps. She dodged broken glass, mindful of the scar on her foot that she did not want to reopen. At the top of the steps, she looked back to the river, where only one bridge crossed. A man standing in the center of it was waving his arms overhead. Rain clouds seemed to be coming in from the west.
She continued on, and the addresses counted down. 189, 187, 185... 179... 171...
On the even side of the street, a Globbo opened the door of a single-story concrete building. Farisa ducked behind a rusty wheelbarrow.
A male voice, as another joined him, shouted “Morning football!”
“Where?” “Let me in!” “I missed the last one!”
The vagrant begged the four Globbos to leave him alone. He did not strike, nor raise his arms to block. One punch put him on the back. One of the other Globbos dragged him by the ankle so they could surround and kick him, which continued until his pleading stopped.
“Shit. I think we killed this one.”
“What’s it matter? E’ery Rent Day, there’s more of ’em.”
Farisa waited for the Globbos to move on. This was not Cait Forest; this was in the everywhere else where the law’s job was to protect the Company’s property—there was little distinction between the official police, wearing brown, and the men in gray.
Shutters were opening up overhead. It was probably a full hour after sunrise; there was too much light and there were too many eyes on Andor Street, at least for this stretch, so she decided to bypass this neighborhood by use of a parallel alley between windowless backs of houses. She checked every intersection before proceeding, and continued in this way until she glanced at a sign, over on Andor Street, indicating 135.
“I’m almost there,” she said to herself. A short segment of a cross street and a dozen yards of backtracking were all that stood between her and the destination, so after checking every angle and especially the windows, she went there. The simple building was so well disguised as an ordinary house, no one would have mistaken it for a Vehu temple. The original construction had been tasteful, as this had clearly once been a wealthy neighborhood, but white paint was chipping off the porch pillars and there was an odor of rot mixed in with the smell of pine tar. Vehu did know how to hide themselves, and such disrepair did serve to blend in, but this seemed to be excessive caution.
She knocked on the wooden front door, which had been sealed shut. No one answered.
“Is anyone here? Please, help me! My name is F—” She stopped herself.
After half a minute with no response, she walked around to the rear entrance, where she found a cloudy window and a tiny black door. The knob refused to turn, so she banged on the wood frame and yelled. A bald man with a missing eye opened the door and shouted obscenities. Farisa ran, realizing by a road sign that she had come to the wrong place: this was 137 South Andor Street.
Work whistles were sounding all over, so Farisa sprinted—across rotting verandas of moribund bungalows, over lawns gone to seed generations ago, past stone sculptures with small cracks—through the city. She jumped over a broken beer bottle. She ducked an ill-considered mezzanine balcony. She squeezed herself between a concrete wall and a trash midden. A Globbo was now following her, maybe more than one, so she yanked loose a banister from a porch railing, swinging it over her head so her pursuer would consider other prey, then barreled down an alley even tighter than this one. Three turns convinced her that she had come into a dead end, leading her to duck behind an empty sixty-gallon drum, hoping the Globbo would choose some other path.
The man shouted orders to halt. He had not found her, but he was getting closer. When the man came around the corner, she slammed the banister into his knee, causing him to scream in pain. She scurried back the way she had come.
She noticed it too late, the thin rope across the road at ankle height that had caused her to trip. she fell forward. The bludgeon left her possession, leaving only the dust of white paint on her sweaty hands. The two soldats who had set the trap closed in. A third, as she stood up, came from behind and tied her wrists together. They bound her legs at the ankles, with bindings so tight her shin bones pressed into each other. A hemp bag fell over her head.
Dark.