They Meet in the Wall
by Subodhana Wijeyeratne
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
part 2
Executions are on the third Treeday of every month, and Neiva’s first one has no dawn. Instead, a dull glow suffuses the clouds low on the horizon and strengthens as the sun rises through the all-swallowing fog. A table has already been set up by the time she, huddled in a black scarf, gets to the top of the wall.
The work groups to whom the condemned belong stand in long-faced lines to the left. There are six today: two women and four men, standing naked and shivering with their hands over their genitals and their eyes on the floor.
There is a black ledger on the table, cover worn shiny from use. She picks this up and signs at the top of one page. Then she hands it to one of the guards, who extracts a pen from somewhere in his black robes and holds it over the pages like a man about to spear a fish in the water.
She approaches the first man and inspects him, taking in his blotchy skin and his concave stomach lost beneath the shadow of his ribcage. A stink hangs about him, gag-inducing and thick. She takes him by the wrist and presses her fingers to his skin and feels his life pulsing past, diminished and soft. His eyes flicker up to hers for an instant, but when she looks up, he looks away.
“Crime?” she says
“Theft,” says a guard.
“What did he steal?”
“Is that—”
“I said, what did he steal?”
“His neighbour’s rations.”
“He gave them to me,” says the man. “He had a stomachache and—”
“Shut your mouth,” says the guard.
Now the man locks eyes with Neiva, and there is too much hope in that gaze for Neiva to stand looking back. She glances at her watch.
“Time of death: 0743 and twelve seconds.”
The man sighs. Behind her, the guard begins to write something and, before the scratch of the pen has died, another one of the guards has stepped forward and shoved the man in the chest. He flails and flips over the side of the parapet. The last Neiva sees of him are his naked feet, soles-up, slipping into the mist.
She proceeds down the line, taking each slim and trembling wrist in her hands and announcing the time of death. She does not ask what their crimes were again and, after the first one, she averts her eyes when they go over the edge. But still, she can hear the thud of their bodies hitting the ground far below. The gathered drones, all shivering now too in their rotting clothes, watch with their eyes wide and their mouths set. But this is how they always look, and Neiva cannot tell if this is a look of horror, or just how the faces of the starving appear. Perhaps it is both.
The last one is a woman and, when Neiva announces the time of death, she screams “It was love! It was love!” and holds on to the parapet. The guards manhandle her over the edge as casually as a butcher snapping a chicken’s neck, and she screams all the way down. When this is done, the guard returns the ledger to Neiva, and she signs her name again and closes it.
“Congratulations, doctor,” he says. “Your first batch.”
Neiva returns to her room and throws up twice into her toilet and stares at the faceless head reflected in the sick-smeared water. Later, she will talk about what happens next to someone she trusts, and she will lie without knowing that she is lying.
She will say that she did not know why she got dressed and headed into the city. She will say she was frightened when she found herself in a drone neighbourhood, where thin-faced women watched her from the windows, where slimy patches of moss grew like an infection along the open sewers. She will say that it was sheer coincidence that she went into one of the bullet-pocked buildings. She will say all these things, but the truth is that in that moment she was doing precisely what she wanted to do. She just could not quite believe it.
She heads up along the chipped marble floor. There are stucco cherubs over the doors here, and half of them have lost their faces. Vinay opens his door before she even gets to it. He watches her as she furiously wipes her face and her mouth and waits for the tears to stop coming. But they don’t. Eventually he just takes her by the hand, and pulls her gently to him.
* * *
He talks in his sleep. Not often, but often enough for her to notice that it is things that do not make sense. Something about brains and a dimensional lattice and calibrations. Sometimes he just mutters, “Fuck,” over and over again. Sometimes he insists to someone that he loves them and that he will return to them, and Neiva knows well enough by now to admit that the reason she hates listening to this is that she wishes he would speak to her the same way.
Now and then, he brings her fat apples that he somehow manages to secrete under his shirt. He pulls each one out as if it is a star he has stolen from the firmament and, when he gives it to her, his face is full of such incandescent delight that she is not sure what she enjoys more, the eating or the receiving.
There is nothing else he can give her apart from that, and half a share of his rations and, of course, she is beyond guilty for accepting it. Soon she begins to secrete bits of her own rations away at home and bring them to him.
For a long time they seem unsure what to do with each other. They spend much of their time in silence. But soon they notice the strange synchronicity of their routines and their desires. They notice that their actions fall to complementarity without trying and that, in itself, becomes something that brings them together.
For Neiva’s part, she has never met anyone who so perfectly mirrors what she wishes when she wishes it, and it is a freedom beyond belief to know that when they sit in silence with the sides of their hands touching, and nothing else, it is precisely what both of them want to be doing.
One day, she manages to swipe half a syrup cake, and she places it on the little table he has by the window, amber liquid oozing from its sides. Vinay crouches by it and inhales deep and pulls a small piece off. Then he nibbles it and bursts into tears.
“What is it?” says Neiva. “What’s wrong?”
He can’t speak. He just buries his face in her chest, and she holds him, and her grip is all the more fierce for her helplessness. She feels his tears on her throat and grief convulsing through him and through her.
Eventually he sits back, wiping his eyes. “It’s just been so long since I tasted sugar,” he says. “I’d forgotten how good it was.”
Her father never finds out that she is stealing rations, but her mother does. One day, she corners Neiva by the door, face pale in the recesses of her headscarf, black robes failing to hide her gauntness, lips blackened with coal dust. “Whoever it is,” she says, “end it soon. For his sake.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” says Neiva.
She expects fury, but all she gets is a sigh.
“Of course you don’t,” says her mother. “Neither did I.”
* * *
One day they are lying pleasantly tangled up in each other on his bed, and she reaches briefly for the scar at the nape of his neck. She stops herself before she touches him and thinks perhaps he hasn’t noticed. But after a few seconds he turns over, looking weary, says, “It was horrible.”
“I’m sorry,” says Neiva, reddening.
“It’s all right. It happened.”
“Why?”
“I found it hard to adjust to the way things are here.” His gaze slips through her. “I found it hard to adapt.”
“Vinay?”
“Yup?”
“Where are you from?”
“I told you. Beyond the Wall.”
“Yes, but where beyond the Wall?”
“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”
“Please.”
He rolls over on his back and puts one forearm over his eyes.
“You’ll think I’m mad.”
“I already think you’re mad. Look who you’re sleeping with.”
He laughs. “Yeah. All right.” He pauses. “I come from another world.”
“Another world?”
He hold his hands up, palms facing each other, and moves them slowly together, and then apart. “There is more to the universe than you see. Your universe, and mine, and ten thousand, eight hundred others, are right next to each other in a higher dimension. It’s hard to explain, but that’s how it works. Yours was an easy universe to get to. When we nailed the technology, we travelled here first.” He pauses. “It was a mistake.”
“What happened?”
“We thought it would be easy to go back the way we came. I suppose we all believed the stories we read when we were younger. The hero can travel to the future, or the past, or into another world entirely, but they always return to where they came from. To exactly where they came from.” He sighs. “But I suppose you can never return to the exact same place you left, even in your own world. I don’t know why we thought we could return home from another dimension without a hitch.”
She doesn’t understand, and part of her strains to disbelieve him, but he speaks so intensely and with such conviction that she can’t bring herself to. For a long while she stares out the window and tries to visualize it all but, every time she thinks she is close, her imagination fails, and it all slips away like mercury.
Eventually the view overpowers her. She has never spent as much time in these drone sectors as she has in the last few months, and she still cannot understand how anyone can stand to live in a place where the sun appears only in thin and slivered instants when it is directly overhead. A place where the stink of industry rides the air, parasitic and sharp. A place where scarcity runs so deep that the only thing people ever speak about is getting more and getting out.
Maybe, she thinks, this is how her whole world appears to Vinay.
“What happened?” she says.
“To me?”
“Yes.”
“I got lost. We were prepared, but not prepared enough. There was only so much time we had to get back, and three of us failed. The others are both dead now. One of them lasted a few days before a fever got him. The other...” He blinks, and tears trickle down his face.
He falls silent. After a while she rolls on top of him and takes him inside her and, for a little while, it does not feel as if they are from different universes at all.
* * *
Copyright © 2018 by Subodhana Wijeyeratne
