The Apex Book of World SF Part 24

What was the use of it then? He lay back on the bed and turned to face the wall.

"Appa? Look at me." She shook him. "Look at me." And when he did, she continued in the same calm voice. "I know it's all very strange and new to you. And Amma is not here to make it easier. But life is change, and we have to adapt. Otherwise, we might as well be fossils. Evolution--"

"What is this evolution-evolution you keep brandishing like a stick?"

"It's a theory that says we don't need a story to explain how we all got here. It was first clearly explained by Darwin--"

"Speak in Tamil, Ganga. Speak in Tamil."

He listened to her fantastic tale about fish that had grown lungs and learnt to walk on earth, a Xerox machine called DNA in every atom and whatnot. As she talked, her alloy-treated hair furled outwards, a controlled motion that had nothing to do with the wind or any natural shake of the head. Somebody was playing with her hair. He closed his eyes.

When she said "cells", he imagined tiny telephones, but when she said "chromosome", "molecule", "recombination", and "species", nothing came to mind at all. He marvelled that she could swallow so incredible a story but refuse to accept the simplest, most obvious explanation understandable by the stupidest child: G.o.d did it. But he didn't want her to stop talking.

"Ganga, this Evolution G.o.d, is it Christian or some other religion only? And if it is Christian, then who is Jesus?"

She was silent for a few long seconds, and when she spoke, it was quiet enough to be almost a sigh. "Aaliyah is right, Appa. If you're to see, you must have the right eyes first. The first step is to set you up with a visor. It won't be as good as having a hea.r.s.ee, but it's better than nothing. It'll be easier to see how it all fits together. Maybe a tour of Galapagos, my research lab, fossil museums...let's see."

He was there, on the battered bench of a battered park, banished for the day, because the house was being energy-audited, and they didn't want him blurting something to the inspector.

It was good to be out, even though the sky was a sickly bluish-grey and the wind was one tooth too sharp. The park was bordered by book shops, clothing stores, cafes, and open-air restaurants. He'd picked a spot on a deserted side of the park because the smell of burning meat reminded him of the ghats of Benares.

Ramaswamy carefully removed the visor and the thimbles from their case. As he stared at the "vision field," it began to shear, as if it were being stretched from opposite corners. The eye had to keep moving, otherwise the visor would lose focus. His arthritic fingers found it hard to gesture the thimbles to manipulate the visor's controls, and after a whilst he began to get confused with the coloured flags, training wheels and little rotating astrology-type signs. The view filled with tiny windows and he blinked helplessly as he tried to regain the original view.

"Don't worry," said Paru. "A spectacles is no match for a Senior Clark from Esso."

Abruptly, a gut-wrenching image of water, wood, blue, and sky filled his vision field. And tentacles. He caught a glimpse of lettering: Marine Research Inst.i.tute. He jerked back in his seat, reaching out to clutch something tangible.

"Hey! No linking," said a voice. "This is a research channel."

And then his view shifted back to the park and its threadbare green. He regained his breath, and with it, triumph. He'd just used somebody else's visor, or more likely, hea.r.s.ee. So this is what "surfing" the I-net was all about.

It took a whilst to retrace his steps, but he managed to get the screen full of windows again, and as it scrolled past, he blinked. And blinked. And blinked. In most cases, he got wobbly images of edges, shadows and corners of rooms. But even when he got a nice view, such as the one from the tourist staring up at the statues on Easter Island, or merely a bizarre one, like that young girl who stared fixedly at different parts of her naked body, what did it matter? Most people seemed to be sitting on equally battered benches staring out over equally battered parks. What did he and they have in common after all, other than a mutual acknowledgment of being lost? He was everywhere and nowhere.

"It is not our time," said Paru, sounding subdued. "Give it a chance."

His visor filled with fifty scattered circles. Ganga had explained that in "idle mode" the visor would show the GPS co-ordinates of people in a half-mile radius. A window popped up, reminding him to "fill in his profile".

"Do what it says," said Paru. "Put up a sign saying you want to chit-chat."

"Keep quiet! You should be sitting here suffering, and I should be in your Madras-coffee-loving head. Irresponsible, selfish cow."

He tried to describe himself but didn't get very far. The "wizard" asked for his Myers-Briggs type, whether he was an introvert or extrovert, whether he was an active or a pa.s.sive voyeur, and on and on. What kinky things turned Ramaswamy on?

Elephants, thimbled Ramaswamy. Temples. Obedient children. Early morning showers. India. Brahmin culture. Decent women. But then he got diverted with the memories of all the delicious foods he would never eat again.

The bench was still slightly wet, perhaps from the early morning rains. The colony's park in Mumbai had always been chock full of people: retirees, teenage lovers, food vendors, toy vendors, mating dogs, laughing clubs, children running about everywhere. The sky looked dark, swollen, a child about to cry. Perhaps global raining was around the corner.

The visor queried his current mood. He selected the most depressed face he could from the samples in front of him.

"I took it all for granted," he thought. His head had begun to ache.

A teenager sat down at the far end of the bench. He had an open, cheerful face framed by a halo of curly black hair. He nodded in Ramaswamy's direction.

"Waz," said the kid. Then he stretched out his legs and made himself comfortable.

The visor claimed the kid's name was Krish and then went on to bug Ramaswamy with a variety of options. Irritated, he took off the visor.

"Excuse me, is your name Krish?"

"Like da tag sez, heya?" The boy seemed a little puzzled, and his eyelids nictated. His expression brightened. "Ya-i-c. Welcome to Oz, uncle."

"I'm Ramaswamy. I'm from India. Tamil Nadu. Are you also from same?"

Krish shrugged. "Maybe. Me's from Wooshnu's navel, maybe."

The boy's accent was not Indian. In fact, Ramaswamy could barely understand what he was saying. "Are you having school holiday today?"

Krish grinned and shook his head. "Waz school? You's the headmaster? What you be teaching, Master Bates?"

Ramaswamy laughed. Kids were scoundrels no matter where they were. "Bad boy. You need to be more disciplined."

"Nuff sport." Krish scooted over. "You's wanting da elephant, heya?"

The boy's eyes were so merry and his smile so infectious, Ramaswamy also found himself smiling. "Heya. Heya. What's this 'heya'?"

"Gimme the izor, dear." The kid reached for the visor, but something about his expression made Ramaswamy s.n.a.t.c.h it away and put it in his shirt pocket.

Krish shrugged and unb.u.t.toned his trousers. "a.s.sayway you's want." He grabbed Ramaswamy's hand and shoved it into his trousers. "Go on. Sample all you's want. 100% desi juice on da tap, uncle dear."

Later, Ramaswamy would puzzle over the fact that the boy's p.e.n.i.s had been hard and erect. But it was only one of the many puzzles.

A police car swooped out of nowhere, a blaze of whirling blue lights and piercing siren. The next ten minutes were a terrifying blur. Two officers jumped out of the car; one ran after Krish, and the other fumbled for his handcuff.

His boss from Esso! How was it possible? The same beefy expression, the same greyish-white whiskers, the same sozzled eyes. Mr Gregory! Just remembering the name after all these years was mildly o.r.g.a.s.mic.

"Mr Gregory, Sir!" Ramaswamy shot to his feet and was ready for dictation.

"Move again a.s.shole, and you'll make my day." The cop pointed an object that resembled a TV remote at Ramaswamy.

But Ramaswamy had already realised his mistake. Of course this policeman wasn't Mr Gregory. His boss had already been middle-aged when he, Ramaswamy, had joined as a young a.s.sistant clerk.

"I'm sorry, I thought you were my boss from Esso. I came here to take some fresh breeze only."

Ramaswamy tried to explain how his hand had ended up in the boy's trousers. The boy clearly needed a doctor, he had a rash of some kind. Perhaps he'd thought an Indian would help. But he was only a retired clerk from Esso, his daughter's dependent, practically a beggar himself. Esso's health insurance had barely covered Paru's treatment; there was nothing he could do for random lost-eyed Indian boys. If the officer would be kind enough to call his daughter, Ganga could confirm every detail. When Ramaswamy reached for the visor in his pocket, the officer tasered him.

In time, the pain faded, as did all direct memory of the incident. In time, a woman in blue came to apologise, and she began to talk about punking clubs, s.a.d.i.s.tic voyeurs, and clockwork p.o.r.n. He understood little, and was grateful when Aaliyah stepped in to keep it that way.

"Do you remember, Appa," Ganga asked him, a few days after the nightmare, "do you remember a terrace, a girl, and a sweeper's boy?"

Of course he remembered. It was the day his daughter's eyes had begun to terrify him. The boy had been beaten to an inch of his life. Deservedly so. There was no comparison.

"Why do you drag up that incident over and over? Nothing happened."

"Do you know that his hands were just as accidentally placed as yours? That I was the guilty one?"

"I don't know anything. Tell me what to say."

"What's the use, then?" She nictated and turned away. "Nevermind, Appa."

When the cold rains came, as they often did in this age of carbon, he liked to sit by a corner window of the house and watch the banana tree in the yard make short work of the water. The rain, as thin as cow's milk, rolled off the tree's bright green plates, as ineffective as a mother's Tamil on a child's unrepentant back. Sometimes the Flamingo would creep up and crouch by him, her eyes blind in thought, her bony fingers ceaselessly working on the general problem of relatives.

"What is the solution?" he once asked the Flamingo, in Tamil, "if the ones I love hate what I love?"

The Flamingo said nothing. Perhaps she hadn't heard. It was moot in any case, for the problem was intractable. Change was inevitable; it hadn't been, but now it was. Call it evolution, fate, choice, or chance. If that was the only way the world would turn, so be it.

But acceptance wouldn't come. The darkness crowded him from all corners, the light of his understanding curving upward along its walls and returning in an ever-tighter loop. Soon, he would be beyond the reach of all stories.

"Amma," Ramaswamy would shout, forgetting himself in his despair. His mother: a chequered six-yard sari, a raspy voice, wrinkled hands, jasmine-scented hair, and the comfort of her sari's corners. "Amma!"

Sometimes his daughter would turn up with a gla.s.s of Horlicks. In her nightdress and short hair, she resembled one of those Goan ladies in India, brown as a coconut but all white inside. She would pretend to listen to his burbling, her eyes blinking absent-mindedly, her hair furling like snakes as it flexed and re-flexed into one of her many styles. She had many styles, but she looked a widow in all of them. She would tell him fantastic tales from science and biology, offering truth when he longed for comfort. He would pick a fight, say outrageous things, insult her friends and all that she held dear, and sometimes Ganga would lose her temper.

"Speak in Tamil," he'd urge. "Speak in Tamil."

Then Ramaswamy would relax. Ah, familiar words. So familiar, so sweetly familiar. He let the ferocious alphabet fall, splish-splosh, all around and galosh, the rain of words, in one ear, out the other, the gentle splash of words, how he missed her, Paru, his comfort, his eyes, how he missed her, his compa.s.s, his all, as he walked, ever faster, into the night.

"Elegy"

Melanie Fazie.

Melanie Fazie is the author of two novels, Trois pepins du fruit des morts (2003) and Arlis des forains (2004), and two short story collections, Serpentine (2004) and Notre-Dame-aux-Ecailles (2008). She won the French Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire for her short fiction, and her stories have appeared widely in English translations. She lives in Paris.

I plead with you, return them to me--please return them. Or let me in, let me join them. I will not resist. I will come to you in silence to recover them. It will be my own decision, even if it is the only one you leave me.

They would have been seven years old now. They were only five at the time. Have you allowed them to grow? Would I recognise them if they were returned to me this evening? Of course! Even changed, even spoiled by the pa.s.sage of time, I would recognise them. Only Benjamin would hide his face, deny the loss--he thinks they are gone for good. Two years in which he gave up hope of ever seeing them again. Resigning yourself to the worst is much easier than my way, than going on with the struggle. Hope saps the will more surely than a lapse of memory. He has wasted two years playing at being deaf and blind, making me look like the village idiot. I tried to explain to Benjamin, but he did not want to know anything. It's always the same for him--they were taken away, whoever has them will not return them even if they are still alive. "They're dead, Deborah. Get used to the idea. You'll never see them again."

Why is it always men who go to pieces? It is not Benjamin who, night after night, comes to this hill to plead for your leniency. He does nothing but wait, drunk more often than he is sober--counting the seconds, the hours, the years that have pa.s.sed since that day.

That day, that morning, just after we woke up, he yelled my name from the doorway to the twins' room. I rushed in, to find it empty. The beds were unmade, the covers were thrown into heaps. The wind was roaring in through the open window. And there was no trace of the children.

Flown away, Adam! Disappeared, Anna!

Rubbed out of our lives, just like that, in one moment, that single second it had taken me to cross to their door. All was lost. There was no going back after that, now that the door had opened onto emptiness. I wanted to think I hadn't seen what had happened, so that I could pretend they were still there, on the other side, playing under the covers like two noisy imps. But that morning, for the first time in their five years, they were not waiting for us.

Benjamin opened the door and regarded the empty bedroom. By then it was too late to close his eyes again. He had been drained in a single heartbeat, as suddenly as a bathtub is emptied when the plug is s.n.a.t.c.hed away. He was still gripping the handle of the door when I rushed up behind him and saw with my own eyes. He uttered my first name, but after that he said no more. Something had died behind his eyes, deep down. He said nothing more. From that first day he gave up. He abandoned everything with a single shrug of his shoulders. His twins, his wife, his family. It's so easy to become a human wreck. When sorrow stands as an alibi, anything is possible.

What good is it to hope, Deborah? They have gone.

Benjamin closed the window and locked the twins' door. He was never to reopen it. Closed with double turn of the lock, creating a sanctum. Spent the first days searching, interrogating neighbours, scouring the fields, more with hope than belief. Finally he settled, comfortably, into quiet despair and wallowed in his loneliness. Now he could let it take over: other people's looks allowed him to. Perhaps the seed had already been in him for a long time. But he had been under self-control for six years. Not a drop of alcohol in front of Adam and Anna, not that, never. Benjamin adored his twins. Now for him there was nothing better to fill the vacuum than draining one bottle after the other. Nothing about him changed, at first appearance. He was like a smooth and succulent fruit, but already rotting inside.

There surely were some who joined him in the bar, ready to sow more discontent with their well-meaning looks and annoyed expressions. You ought to know, Benjamin, we have seen your wife acting weirdly out there at the top of the hill. You should keep your eye on her. And Benjamin gestured to them to get lost and leave him alone.

I tried to explain to him, though. How could he not see the signs? Pyjamas rolled up in a ball, left on the hill, Anna's teddy bear, which lay in the middle of the lawn? The window opened from inside? What kind of prowler could have broken into the house without causing damage? They opened the window themselves. They knew what they were doing. It is like those vampire stories where the monster may only enter when it has been invited. They opened the window and they left in the night. They came to you because you called them. They came naked as they were on their first day of life. Laughing, surely? Scarcely five years of life, ten years of experience between them, and they could already hear your voice. Me, I never knew to learn. I never wished it, either. Until the day when you took them.

I showed Benjamin the marks and the clues. I even brought him to you so that he could see what I can see, but he averted his eyes with an expression of weariness beyond irritation. As if it were I who had become the wreck, the drunkard. As if I had pointed to mirages born of a sick brain. Two years that he has been closed like an oyster, hermetic, because if he opened up, even for a moment, all the whys and hows would flood in, and he would have to acknowledge there is no answer.

So, I was the one who came to you when at last I understood. I think I had done so from the very first. Unable to fight you, I learnt how to know you. Over those two years, I spent more nights with you on this hill than in the marital bed. That is where Benjamin turned his back on me, whilst breathing the restless sleep of cowards. I came to plead with you, to beg you, to threaten you, and you stayed there with me to scoff. You kept them where I could see them, but they were always beyond my reach. I waited, and I learnt. You let me explore, one evening after another, whilst my gestures became more a.s.sured. I returned home reeking of your smell. Benjamin slept. He thought I was mad.

If only he had listened to me, just the once. If he had taken in what I told him he would have come to you with an axe, and used it mercilessly. Afterward he would have consigned you to fire, until the memory of the twins flew up in the smoke. He would fire the entire hill, to put the last seal of certainty on his forgetting.

The first few times when I scratched your sh.e.l.l I skinned the palms of my hands. The bark is rough against hands that have not been coa.r.s.ened. My fists are bruised where they attacked your hard bark. I soiled you with traces of my blood, like a derisory, ridiculous offering. I struck, spat, and scratched, a demented woman. This wound in the bark, a trace in the tissue like a scar, it was I who tore off this splinter with my fingernails, one night when silence wounded my ears. That silence asphyxiating me like a foetid smell, on top of the hill, you rearing up in front of me, roots anch.o.r.ed well in the ground. I would have sworn it was you who silenced the noise, who stole the air I was trying to breathe. The twins, weren't they enough for you? I risked glancing down to the bottom of the hill, where the houses were quiet, as if they were blind, then up toward the sky, glimpsed between your branches stretching out to scratch the stars. I felt the weight of the world crushing me. Then I concentrated on the shade of the twins that was in you.

There were nights when I was so desperate I would have torn off the skin on my fingers to strip you of your bark, one flake at a time, leaving you naked, to get to my twins beneath the surface. Then you would have had to return them to me. I would have separated the Siamese creature with my fingernails, to make them into two again, Anna and Adam. I would have attacked you with bare hands, if I had thought it would have done any good.

Instead, I learnt. I discovered the intoxicating perfume of your bark after the rain. The feeling of wood beneath my fingers, solid and rea.s.suring, all this power in my arms. The complexity of the mosaic on which my palms slipped, like the scales of an old and fantastic animal. I learnt how to know your rough edges, at first with delicate care, as one discovers the skin of a new lover.

Benjamin laughed the first time we made love, eight years ago, close to this place. He was a nineteen-year-old urchin who could not believe in his luck. We were married on this hill. After the ceremony he chased me through the brambles, which tore at my marriage veils, as foolish as a schoolboy running after girls' skirts. He planted two seeds in me whilst we lay between the trees, away from the gaze of others. I brushed past you in my torn skirts. Did you know then what was coming?

The bark is not so hard to the touch when one grows used to it. I know through my fingertips the relief map of your grooves, your canyons, the edges where I wounded my hands. I learnt the pattern of your wrinkles and your veins, your fault lines and your crevices, the map of your scars. I inspected you as if you were a door without a visible lock, one openable only by looking for the sesame spell. Or as if you were an ancient parchment that had to be deciphered. Did it amuse you to watch me? To see me whilst holding my little ones out of reach?

I don't know how Benjamin failed to see the two masks set in the bark. Two faces drawn in the higher part of the trunk, just below the nodes of your main branches, as if carved from the same wood. They can be seen, though. The features are coa.r.s.e: just eyes, nose, mouth. Neither lips, nor hair, nor eyebrows. But they seem a natural part of the whole, as if they have always been there. Two oval growths on the trunk, back to back. Admit that you did it on purpose! Two years that they turn their backs on each other, like the two faces of Ja.n.u.s. You did this deliberately, to separate them. It is all part of the irony of the thing: they are together, but they cannot see each other.

You made them so that I cannot see them both at the same time. I have to choose between Adam and Anna. You placed them out of reach, just too far away for me to skim my fingertips across them. I did try, though. But you are huge, on a human scale. The trunk is so large I cannot encircle it with my two arms.

You erased even their differences. The two faces are identical, like two African masks without distinguishing features. They were still at the age where people could confuse them. They often wondered which of the twins was the small girl, which the boy. The same round face, the same black hair cut short, the same eyebrows already clearly featured, inherited from Benjamin. Anna had a small dimple in her left cheek when she laughed. Of the two of them, she was already the wild one. She would have made my life difficult if she had grown up. Such a mischievous smile signals great crises ahead. Adam was calmer, more secretive. Undoubtedly because one day he would need boundless patience to unravel the damage of his twin tornado.

I searched for them in the faces of the other children as they walked out of school. All the five-year-old kids of the neighbourhood. I watched them pa.s.sing, as I stood with the group of other mothers. I was rooted to the spot. All these good, home-loving women who would never come on the hill for their little ones. But it is true that I spent many days there, to keep an eye on the school. I hated them, those animated faces so full of life. All those little faces, too adorable to be fair. They nauseated me.

I sought and found two of them. A little boy, a small girl, both five years old. Almost alike enough to be twins. Perhaps they were cousins. Same black hair, same gra.s.shopper limbs, like Adam, like Anna. One evening I arrived before their mothers. I carried them in my arms to you, offering a trade. And you refused them. I would have delivered every kid in the village to you if you had asked. I would have knifed them with a light heart for the return of my own twins. But carved in wood, the two faces were always waiting.

Did they see me burying their soft toys and their clothing between your roots?

From the first I believed that the face on the left was Anna's. It seemed to me I could see one of the masks smiling, if a smile could be detected under the bark. But I was deluding myself. They are identical, except for small details. And I cannot even see them side by side to compare them. To look closely at one of them, it is necessary to turn away from the other.

Do they look at me, from their perch? And if they do see me, can they at least remember me? Perhaps their memory has become stilled, now that you and they have become one. I always believed that a child could not forget his mother. You can't avoid such ideas, when face to face with your fears. Two children with the memory of a tree. Lost in their wooden sleep, their chlorophyll dreams.

Certain evenings, I wound myself around your limbs so that I could press my ear against your skin. I thought I could hear something fluttering beneath your bark, almost within reach. It reminded me of my former life, when Benjamin's quiet breathing sometimes kept me awake in our bed. I thought I heard twin hearts beating slowly against my ear. But I was just deluding myself again.

Have you at least let them grow? They are always five years old in my head--as they will be, undoubtedly, in their chrysalis. They would be cramped if they were growing physically. They would need to learn how to spread through your membranes to leave them changed. If you were to return them to me this evening, would I recognise them? Two years of sleep nourished by your sap, that must leave a trace. They would inevitably be changed. A little more arboreal, a little less human. But you would return them to me! I would take them again just as they are, I promise you. Benjamin would not understand, but I would take them again, no matter what form they might be in. And whether or not they recognised me.