Patchwork dolls, p.2
Patchwork Dolls, page 2
* * *
THE VALIUM DEMOLISHED HER migraines but made her physically high; she felt like an oil slick. The weather had been so damp lately that she felt exhausted just from walking down the street to collect bread, some fruit. She had stopped going to the deli on the corner last year, so she had to cross two blocks to get to the Korean grocers. They were kind to her there.
The fungi grew. They drooped in translucent layers; she wore them proudly. She liked the way the growths felt on her ears, her neck, warm and familiar, eating up the sunlight and spring. She saw people staring at her. At home, she made sure to wash her ear fungi carefully in the shower. They perked up in the water.
Her mother kept calling—come home, stop wasting your life, it’s too dangerous for you there, you never pay attention, why haven’t you figured anything out yet?—but she found herself caring less and less. It felt as if her mother was describing someone who no longer existed. She noticed in herself not the familiar sensation of panicked heat, but a cool closing off, of the external world not being able to reach her.
On certain days last year she had woken up and was sure that she was already dead. That the face in the mirror was just a bleak reanimation, pale and silvery. But now she saw something else.
Look, look here.
The fungi crept around her face, breathing and breeding in her skin with a warmth she had never felt before. A skin upon her skin. Something beautiful—alive.
* * *
SHE DISCOVERED MUSHROOM SPAWN in her bathroom. They were tiny, like the holes in her skin. White slime covered the walls. She looked up how to cultivate mushrooms. Shade. Silence. Water. She made sure to always close the door, to not let any wind disturb them. And she stopped leaving her apartment.
* * *
AND AFTER ALL, WHY should she leave? After she had woken up one day last year and decided to buy some avocadoes—and then got dressed in a nice shirt just because—and then, feeling generous from the beautiful blue day, decided later she would call her mother—and then she thought of how every day in New York could feel like this, soft and glow-edged, even though there were rats glutting on trash right on the street—and then she decided to listen to a podcast as she walked, the one her boyfriend, now ex, had sent and she had been meaning to listen to all week—and then halfway down the street someone had called out to her, but she had her headphones in—and then again she heard a faint sound, and she turned—and saw a bottle, being shaken vigorously, attached to a man whose face she couldn’t recall, no matter how many times the police asked, no matter how many times her mother screamed at her to remember, remember, remember—and then he had thrown a rainfall of electricity, an entire liter of acid, on her face.
Better to stay inside, with these living things that required nothing but herself, as she was. They knew about survival. She listened to them. When she drew her flesh near, she could feel them trembling, defiant, alive.
* * *
NOEL’S LANDLORD, TWO HUNDRED pounds of ham-fisted rage and hair grease, came by her apartment. He tried to push the door open when he heard her rustling around inside. But the door was seamed shut with spines of fungus, which had sprouted from the damp, split wood. She giggled. She had forgotten how good it felt to disobey.
“I’ll be back,” he said. “You’re lucky I haven’t called the police.” His voice dropped as he stomped down the stairs: “Fucking Chinese. Fucking fucking chink.”
She heard her neighbors come out from their apartments, including the immigrant family who lived all together, all six of them, next to her. In the middle of the night, when they flushed the toilet, she always heard the water through the walls.
Her phone was ringing but she didn’t answer. When she laughed, she felt herself vibrate. The fungus in her ears shook too.
* * *
THE MUSHROOMS WERE NOW replicating, tipping away from the walls, gilled and glass-transparent. She visited the bathroom often as it had no windows and was the best place to recover from a migraine. She liked to lie in the bathtub fully clothed, with towels lining the hard ceramic, the lights off. Often when she woke from a nap, she would sense a dampness around her, although she hadn’t used any water. It felt like a mossy blanket, a protection. The mushrooms in her bathroom and in her ears liked it. They kept growing.
* * *
ANOTHER IRATE EVICTION NOTICE arrived at her door. Her mother kept calling, the voicemails piling up. An email pinged in her inbox: her employer, raging, asking her what was happening, where was all the work. The publication of his book would now be delayed, he said, and he would not transfer her payment until she explained herself.
But Noel was dreaming again. There were two closed doors, and behind one she could hear a shadow hammering, loud scratchy music, the drone of ambulances and police sirens, phone calls all hours long. The other door was quiet, still, damp.
The fungus had grown out of her ears and now enveloped her skull; crowned her scalp. Spores trailed down her neck and back. She smelled fermented, peaty, and her hands were webbed together, the tips of them growing tiny little red caps. Her eyes were moist and lined with mycelium.
She felt another migraine coming on. Two Valium down her throat. The silence coated her in relief.
In the bathroom, a colorless land waited for her. The pellucid mushrooms leaned, they curved to her flesh, the scars on her face, like a million tiny hands reaching from the rim of the bathtub. Lowering herself in, she waited for the spores to merge with every cell in her body.
Please, Get Out and Dance
Lastly, they discarded the perishables: tart green alliums; stalks of celtuce; shrimps defrosted and vein-blue; and cubed apples for Grandma, who had lost her teeth long ago. Outside, past their windows and down on the ground was a tableau vivant of foodstuff on which birds noisily descended. A family of wild boars congregated around the black-dotted bananas. From above, Frankie saw a pile of freshly shucked Spam looking like pale, dismembered tongues. She watched as people started fires in metal cans, the heat giving the air a syrupy texture, making everything resemble an oil painting, scenes already worn out.
All day long people had been holding small funerals for their books, photographs, clothing. But Frankie’s family had already parsed their belongings to the bare minimum, having lived in a state of uncertainty for so long already. “Better to do it ourselves than have it all disappear one day,” Grandma had said.
The volunteers said throwing the food out would help repopulate the inhospitable land with seeds and nutrients. The animals would help recreate a new biodiverse world, they explained, the wild flying ones especially, but also domesticated pets: cats, dogs, rabbits, chinchillas, hamsters, and even turtles and fish, if you could find a pond to release them into. Upon hearing this, Frankie had been grateful for once that their landlord did not accept pets and she did not, like so many of her friends, have to say yet another goodbye.
The sun was rising. A low-pitched siren began somewhere. Then each building began to emit the same noise as the clock shifted: a deep and alien wail.
Frankie had once read that music and voices with lower, deeper tones and minimal pitch variation were more comforting to the human ear. That was why lullabies played to babies and patients in palliative care were often indistinguishable, the ambient noise calling blood and flesh into deeper sleep states. A few years ago, she visited a New Age store and noticed a set of tuning forks. The sales assistant tapped the silver once on a stone and then circled it lightly around her scalp, which hummed with the same comforting frequency. “This one is 432 hertz,” he said. “It’s great for relaxation and peace.”
Frankie thought about this as she felt these rumbling alarms, noting how her skin, her hair murmured, how her body was reacting to something she didn’t know the meaning of yet. She looked at her mother, who nodded. It was time to go.
* * *
OVER THE WAIL OF the alarm, there was the resounding instruction: “Please proceed to the square and begin the day’s activities. Please, get out and dance!”
Management had disabled the elevators to avoid delays, and so they walked down twenty-eight flights, hemmed in along the tight corners of the stairwell. On the fifth floor, the apartment block split into ground-level restaurants and shops. Here, a volunteer with a tiny yellow sticker on their wrist—a sign that they were to be trusted—handed slips to Frankie, her mother, and her grandmother. This indicated where they should go next: a secret destination far away from the square. The metallic clangs of industrial ventilation units covered the rattling in Frankie’s chest as they left the building and slipped into an alleyway, joining cats and dogs gingerly pawing the webs of food and searching for their owners.
The alarms were louder and deeper now, seeping into their bodies like light, calling them to another place. As they left, the apartment block silvered as if veiled by a shimmering cloth. Frankie thought she saw a white dot puncturing the sky: burning, glistering. But when she looked again, it was gone.
* * *
THAT YEAR, MORE AND more buildings were disappearing, but nobody knew why or where they went. It was the beginning of the end, they suspected—soon the roads would vanish too, and the parks and ponds, and, finally, the mountains.
Several activists had warned people about this after authorities implemented a central network system that tracked and classified everything. Back then, the warning seemed no more than a hoax. But then things began to disappear. Small, unnoticeable things at first: a handlebar on the bus, a strip of yellow on the road. Glitches, just glitches, the authorities told them. But how could one explain the disappearance of a single mahjong tile from thousands of sets across the city? Or the words on one specific page of a book?
An anonymous online group found leaked data reports that taxonomized the city and began crossing out items that they could no longer find. Black ink pens. An indigenous flower species. Mailboxes. Apples. Adding them up, they concluded that the disappearances were not random. They decided that some preparation was needed.
* * *
AFTER THE VERY FIRST building disappeared, many people settled in, claiming they had nothing to hide or fear. Some migrated quietly without telling others. A third, small group— which included Frankie, her mother, and grandmother—did not want to go to America, or to England, or to any of the neighboring island-states. Nor could they stay here.
Inhabiting a small area of the deep sea had been the idea of a young urban planning student. He identified a dry pocket of air, a bump on the seafloor. He drew up where apartment blocks could be built, a little park for young children to run and play, schools for students to reinvent their futures. They would have to swim, quite far, and for a long time, but it was doable. “After all,” he said, “our people came from the sea.” His presentations, shown to Frankie and others in bookstores and cafés that had now all disappeared, contained slides of half-fish, half-human creatures depicted in cave drawings and ancient cloth patterns. He believed there were still fish-children living in the water, and on quiet days you could hear their voices reeding through the waves, calling to their landlocked relatives. He said, “The pearls you wear on your necks are their tears. The food you eat is their harvest. Their hair is what you boil into soups.”
There was a bird’s-eye rendering of the dry pocket drawn on drafting paper. Around it, the student had patched the paper with indigo squares: a constellation of water, a sky under mountain. He said, “This is where we can go.”
* * *
A VOLUNTEER NETWORK OF hacktivists determined exactly when many buildings would disappear, connecting the event to the first day of the lunar new year. On this day, authorities typically organized a mass parade, and it was mandatory for everyone to appear and dance. The dancing was enforced tradition; Frankie’s late father had called it “an absurdist form of soft power,” one of the many ways nationalism veiled itself as culture. Before, the dancing could take any form if it was patriotic and joyful in spirit, but recently that had changed. People were beaten or arrested for dancing in ways authorities deemed seditious, and so a standardized set of steps was devised, the choreography taught to everyone in the city.
On the tenth anniversary of the implementation of the central network system, there was due to be the biggest parade ever. The date was fortuitous: In the almanac, it was considered “a good day for change.”
* * *
THE SIRENS. PLEASE PROCEED to the square and begin the day’s activities of dance. Please, get out and dance!
Frankie looked at her slip. The location of where she needed to go was somewhere up on the other side of the mountain. Better get moving.
* * *
THE JOURNEY FROM THEIR building to the departure point would take approximately five hours, and along the way they would have to hide, weaving through foliage and rock. Only a few hundred people were present, which surprised Frankie, although she couldn’t tell if the others had already been caught or disappeared.
There was water everywhere from a recent rainstorm, and the peaty smell reminded Frankie of past typhoons, boarding up their windows with her father, strapping down the washing machine to the roof’s railings. Living with windows was a luxury later in life. In her childhood apartment, there were none, only metal bars, and so the water seeped in constantly. In the summer months, her grandfather took her to the local public gardens, where children stuck their fingers in gushing pools fetid with half-comatose fish. The sound of that artificial waterfall, the mechanisms of a false nature, jarred in her mind as they wound through the swampy organs of the outdoors.
She listened carefully now, but she could not hear the fish-children crying. The only sound came from a barrel of macaques who were biting the legs off a picnic bench, the wood wormed to stumps.
The group reached their halfway point, a small museum in the mountain ranges x-ed for demolition, which featured a still-functional drinking fountain. They all took turns wetting their faces, water silvering on their foreheads and necks.
The museum was one of the few buildings that appeared to be exempt from disappearance and was now being reabsorbed by nature. Its exterior was clad in a thin sheet of metal that was furred with rust, and through the large atrium window Frankie saw a hanging red sculpture slowly breeding with dust and fungi. Frankie’s mother and grandmother gossiped about the original owners, a wealthy collector couple who had funded the space before it was annexed by the authorities.
“I heard they moved to Belgium,” said Frankie’s mother, somewhat wistfully.
“比利時? What’s there?”
“I don’t know. Art.”
“But I thought the husband is the son of some wealthy shipping guy. So, they took their money to Europe?”
“I don’t know, 媽. Rich people, they move easily.”
“Frankie! Don’t you know someone who worked there?”
An ex. She remembered how every morning he would shave for half an hour, so careful with the blade, the cream, so that his face would be shiny and smooth. And all to sit at reception; to direct people to the bathroom; to give out thick leaflets printed on paper that cost more than his daily salary. He had been one of the first to move, settling in a small suburban town in Virginia where his aunt lived. Frankie had heard that he was no longer involved in politics or arts and he now spent his time fixing the computers and electronic devices of rich white people. She imagined him shutting down and restarting laptops, desktops, the screens blinking and blackening endlessly.
“Yes,” she said, looking into the inscrutable thicket of trees ahead. “Used to.”
* * *
THINGS FRANKIE HAD THROWN away a while ago: Her watch. A few pairs of shoes (inexpensive, primarily for sports). Shorts, t-shirts, a single blue dress worn at her graduation. A set of small notebooks, some cramped with looped writing, others with barely a glyph or mark in their pages. Passport photographs of her father when he was fifteen, in his early twenties, then in his fifties, just before he died. Her phone, which contained both an infinite number of memories and none at all. She had deleted everything months ago so that her screen only presented the date, time, and weather.
When she looked at her phone for the last time, she remembered distantly the memory of silly photographs of herself and her friends, screenshots of conversations, data that tracked her health and sleep patterns, and, less explicitly, where she went, how long she spent in coffee shops and public spaces, what she was buying and not buying. There had been an app that tracked her father’s glucose levels, and she looked at it often, as if the last molecular remnants of him were stored in that tiny blue square. But in the end, erasing it, along with everything else, was easier than she thought. Sentimentality was a privilege when things disappeared so often.
* * *
BACK IN THE CITY, people danced colorlessly. Music streamed from every speaker. Somewhere in the crowd, a woman with a poster in her hands screamed and screamed, but nobody could hear what she was saying—the orchestra of sound was so loud—and then she was gone. How or where she went nobody knew, although the entire event was filmed live and played back to the dancing masses. Their feet flowed the same circular lines, their cheeks swollen as if bitten by mosquitoes, thousands of them stepping and hopping and arching their limbs on the enormous flat screen, where everyone looked at themselves looking at each other.
* * *
ACROSS THE OTHER SIDE of the mountain, the group reached an abandoned theme park. Dozens of kiosks were out as if on standby, some cluttered with soft toys blistering in the sun. There was trash still in the bins, flossy and gray, soft with mold. Inside, the animal enclosures—aviary cages that once held parrots and cockatoos, the faux bamboo grove that had housed two pandas—were empty, although Frankie couldn’t tell how long they had been vacant.
THE VALIUM DEMOLISHED HER migraines but made her physically high; she felt like an oil slick. The weather had been so damp lately that she felt exhausted just from walking down the street to collect bread, some fruit. She had stopped going to the deli on the corner last year, so she had to cross two blocks to get to the Korean grocers. They were kind to her there.
The fungi grew. They drooped in translucent layers; she wore them proudly. She liked the way the growths felt on her ears, her neck, warm and familiar, eating up the sunlight and spring. She saw people staring at her. At home, she made sure to wash her ear fungi carefully in the shower. They perked up in the water.
Her mother kept calling—come home, stop wasting your life, it’s too dangerous for you there, you never pay attention, why haven’t you figured anything out yet?—but she found herself caring less and less. It felt as if her mother was describing someone who no longer existed. She noticed in herself not the familiar sensation of panicked heat, but a cool closing off, of the external world not being able to reach her.
On certain days last year she had woken up and was sure that she was already dead. That the face in the mirror was just a bleak reanimation, pale and silvery. But now she saw something else.
Look, look here.
The fungi crept around her face, breathing and breeding in her skin with a warmth she had never felt before. A skin upon her skin. Something beautiful—alive.
* * *
SHE DISCOVERED MUSHROOM SPAWN in her bathroom. They were tiny, like the holes in her skin. White slime covered the walls. She looked up how to cultivate mushrooms. Shade. Silence. Water. She made sure to always close the door, to not let any wind disturb them. And she stopped leaving her apartment.
* * *
AND AFTER ALL, WHY should she leave? After she had woken up one day last year and decided to buy some avocadoes—and then got dressed in a nice shirt just because—and then, feeling generous from the beautiful blue day, decided later she would call her mother—and then she thought of how every day in New York could feel like this, soft and glow-edged, even though there were rats glutting on trash right on the street—and then she decided to listen to a podcast as she walked, the one her boyfriend, now ex, had sent and she had been meaning to listen to all week—and then halfway down the street someone had called out to her, but she had her headphones in—and then again she heard a faint sound, and she turned—and saw a bottle, being shaken vigorously, attached to a man whose face she couldn’t recall, no matter how many times the police asked, no matter how many times her mother screamed at her to remember, remember, remember—and then he had thrown a rainfall of electricity, an entire liter of acid, on her face.
Better to stay inside, with these living things that required nothing but herself, as she was. They knew about survival. She listened to them. When she drew her flesh near, she could feel them trembling, defiant, alive.
* * *
NOEL’S LANDLORD, TWO HUNDRED pounds of ham-fisted rage and hair grease, came by her apartment. He tried to push the door open when he heard her rustling around inside. But the door was seamed shut with spines of fungus, which had sprouted from the damp, split wood. She giggled. She had forgotten how good it felt to disobey.
“I’ll be back,” he said. “You’re lucky I haven’t called the police.” His voice dropped as he stomped down the stairs: “Fucking Chinese. Fucking fucking chink.”
She heard her neighbors come out from their apartments, including the immigrant family who lived all together, all six of them, next to her. In the middle of the night, when they flushed the toilet, she always heard the water through the walls.
Her phone was ringing but she didn’t answer. When she laughed, she felt herself vibrate. The fungus in her ears shook too.
* * *
THE MUSHROOMS WERE NOW replicating, tipping away from the walls, gilled and glass-transparent. She visited the bathroom often as it had no windows and was the best place to recover from a migraine. She liked to lie in the bathtub fully clothed, with towels lining the hard ceramic, the lights off. Often when she woke from a nap, she would sense a dampness around her, although she hadn’t used any water. It felt like a mossy blanket, a protection. The mushrooms in her bathroom and in her ears liked it. They kept growing.
* * *
ANOTHER IRATE EVICTION NOTICE arrived at her door. Her mother kept calling, the voicemails piling up. An email pinged in her inbox: her employer, raging, asking her what was happening, where was all the work. The publication of his book would now be delayed, he said, and he would not transfer her payment until she explained herself.
But Noel was dreaming again. There were two closed doors, and behind one she could hear a shadow hammering, loud scratchy music, the drone of ambulances and police sirens, phone calls all hours long. The other door was quiet, still, damp.
The fungus had grown out of her ears and now enveloped her skull; crowned her scalp. Spores trailed down her neck and back. She smelled fermented, peaty, and her hands were webbed together, the tips of them growing tiny little red caps. Her eyes were moist and lined with mycelium.
She felt another migraine coming on. Two Valium down her throat. The silence coated her in relief.
In the bathroom, a colorless land waited for her. The pellucid mushrooms leaned, they curved to her flesh, the scars on her face, like a million tiny hands reaching from the rim of the bathtub. Lowering herself in, she waited for the spores to merge with every cell in her body.
Please, Get Out and Dance
Lastly, they discarded the perishables: tart green alliums; stalks of celtuce; shrimps defrosted and vein-blue; and cubed apples for Grandma, who had lost her teeth long ago. Outside, past their windows and down on the ground was a tableau vivant of foodstuff on which birds noisily descended. A family of wild boars congregated around the black-dotted bananas. From above, Frankie saw a pile of freshly shucked Spam looking like pale, dismembered tongues. She watched as people started fires in metal cans, the heat giving the air a syrupy texture, making everything resemble an oil painting, scenes already worn out.
All day long people had been holding small funerals for their books, photographs, clothing. But Frankie’s family had already parsed their belongings to the bare minimum, having lived in a state of uncertainty for so long already. “Better to do it ourselves than have it all disappear one day,” Grandma had said.
The volunteers said throwing the food out would help repopulate the inhospitable land with seeds and nutrients. The animals would help recreate a new biodiverse world, they explained, the wild flying ones especially, but also domesticated pets: cats, dogs, rabbits, chinchillas, hamsters, and even turtles and fish, if you could find a pond to release them into. Upon hearing this, Frankie had been grateful for once that their landlord did not accept pets and she did not, like so many of her friends, have to say yet another goodbye.
The sun was rising. A low-pitched siren began somewhere. Then each building began to emit the same noise as the clock shifted: a deep and alien wail.
Frankie had once read that music and voices with lower, deeper tones and minimal pitch variation were more comforting to the human ear. That was why lullabies played to babies and patients in palliative care were often indistinguishable, the ambient noise calling blood and flesh into deeper sleep states. A few years ago, she visited a New Age store and noticed a set of tuning forks. The sales assistant tapped the silver once on a stone and then circled it lightly around her scalp, which hummed with the same comforting frequency. “This one is 432 hertz,” he said. “It’s great for relaxation and peace.”
Frankie thought about this as she felt these rumbling alarms, noting how her skin, her hair murmured, how her body was reacting to something she didn’t know the meaning of yet. She looked at her mother, who nodded. It was time to go.
* * *
OVER THE WAIL OF the alarm, there was the resounding instruction: “Please proceed to the square and begin the day’s activities. Please, get out and dance!”
Management had disabled the elevators to avoid delays, and so they walked down twenty-eight flights, hemmed in along the tight corners of the stairwell. On the fifth floor, the apartment block split into ground-level restaurants and shops. Here, a volunteer with a tiny yellow sticker on their wrist—a sign that they were to be trusted—handed slips to Frankie, her mother, and her grandmother. This indicated where they should go next: a secret destination far away from the square. The metallic clangs of industrial ventilation units covered the rattling in Frankie’s chest as they left the building and slipped into an alleyway, joining cats and dogs gingerly pawing the webs of food and searching for their owners.
The alarms were louder and deeper now, seeping into their bodies like light, calling them to another place. As they left, the apartment block silvered as if veiled by a shimmering cloth. Frankie thought she saw a white dot puncturing the sky: burning, glistering. But when she looked again, it was gone.
* * *
THAT YEAR, MORE AND more buildings were disappearing, but nobody knew why or where they went. It was the beginning of the end, they suspected—soon the roads would vanish too, and the parks and ponds, and, finally, the mountains.
Several activists had warned people about this after authorities implemented a central network system that tracked and classified everything. Back then, the warning seemed no more than a hoax. But then things began to disappear. Small, unnoticeable things at first: a handlebar on the bus, a strip of yellow on the road. Glitches, just glitches, the authorities told them. But how could one explain the disappearance of a single mahjong tile from thousands of sets across the city? Or the words on one specific page of a book?
An anonymous online group found leaked data reports that taxonomized the city and began crossing out items that they could no longer find. Black ink pens. An indigenous flower species. Mailboxes. Apples. Adding them up, they concluded that the disappearances were not random. They decided that some preparation was needed.
* * *
AFTER THE VERY FIRST building disappeared, many people settled in, claiming they had nothing to hide or fear. Some migrated quietly without telling others. A third, small group— which included Frankie, her mother, and grandmother—did not want to go to America, or to England, or to any of the neighboring island-states. Nor could they stay here.
Inhabiting a small area of the deep sea had been the idea of a young urban planning student. He identified a dry pocket of air, a bump on the seafloor. He drew up where apartment blocks could be built, a little park for young children to run and play, schools for students to reinvent their futures. They would have to swim, quite far, and for a long time, but it was doable. “After all,” he said, “our people came from the sea.” His presentations, shown to Frankie and others in bookstores and cafés that had now all disappeared, contained slides of half-fish, half-human creatures depicted in cave drawings and ancient cloth patterns. He believed there were still fish-children living in the water, and on quiet days you could hear their voices reeding through the waves, calling to their landlocked relatives. He said, “The pearls you wear on your necks are their tears. The food you eat is their harvest. Their hair is what you boil into soups.”
There was a bird’s-eye rendering of the dry pocket drawn on drafting paper. Around it, the student had patched the paper with indigo squares: a constellation of water, a sky under mountain. He said, “This is where we can go.”
* * *
A VOLUNTEER NETWORK OF hacktivists determined exactly when many buildings would disappear, connecting the event to the first day of the lunar new year. On this day, authorities typically organized a mass parade, and it was mandatory for everyone to appear and dance. The dancing was enforced tradition; Frankie’s late father had called it “an absurdist form of soft power,” one of the many ways nationalism veiled itself as culture. Before, the dancing could take any form if it was patriotic and joyful in spirit, but recently that had changed. People were beaten or arrested for dancing in ways authorities deemed seditious, and so a standardized set of steps was devised, the choreography taught to everyone in the city.
On the tenth anniversary of the implementation of the central network system, there was due to be the biggest parade ever. The date was fortuitous: In the almanac, it was considered “a good day for change.”
* * *
THE SIRENS. PLEASE PROCEED to the square and begin the day’s activities of dance. Please, get out and dance!
Frankie looked at her slip. The location of where she needed to go was somewhere up on the other side of the mountain. Better get moving.
* * *
THE JOURNEY FROM THEIR building to the departure point would take approximately five hours, and along the way they would have to hide, weaving through foliage and rock. Only a few hundred people were present, which surprised Frankie, although she couldn’t tell if the others had already been caught or disappeared.
There was water everywhere from a recent rainstorm, and the peaty smell reminded Frankie of past typhoons, boarding up their windows with her father, strapping down the washing machine to the roof’s railings. Living with windows was a luxury later in life. In her childhood apartment, there were none, only metal bars, and so the water seeped in constantly. In the summer months, her grandfather took her to the local public gardens, where children stuck their fingers in gushing pools fetid with half-comatose fish. The sound of that artificial waterfall, the mechanisms of a false nature, jarred in her mind as they wound through the swampy organs of the outdoors.
She listened carefully now, but she could not hear the fish-children crying. The only sound came from a barrel of macaques who were biting the legs off a picnic bench, the wood wormed to stumps.
The group reached their halfway point, a small museum in the mountain ranges x-ed for demolition, which featured a still-functional drinking fountain. They all took turns wetting their faces, water silvering on their foreheads and necks.
The museum was one of the few buildings that appeared to be exempt from disappearance and was now being reabsorbed by nature. Its exterior was clad in a thin sheet of metal that was furred with rust, and through the large atrium window Frankie saw a hanging red sculpture slowly breeding with dust and fungi. Frankie’s mother and grandmother gossiped about the original owners, a wealthy collector couple who had funded the space before it was annexed by the authorities.
“I heard they moved to Belgium,” said Frankie’s mother, somewhat wistfully.
“比利時? What’s there?”
“I don’t know. Art.”
“But I thought the husband is the son of some wealthy shipping guy. So, they took their money to Europe?”
“I don’t know, 媽. Rich people, they move easily.”
“Frankie! Don’t you know someone who worked there?”
An ex. She remembered how every morning he would shave for half an hour, so careful with the blade, the cream, so that his face would be shiny and smooth. And all to sit at reception; to direct people to the bathroom; to give out thick leaflets printed on paper that cost more than his daily salary. He had been one of the first to move, settling in a small suburban town in Virginia where his aunt lived. Frankie had heard that he was no longer involved in politics or arts and he now spent his time fixing the computers and electronic devices of rich white people. She imagined him shutting down and restarting laptops, desktops, the screens blinking and blackening endlessly.
“Yes,” she said, looking into the inscrutable thicket of trees ahead. “Used to.”
* * *
THINGS FRANKIE HAD THROWN away a while ago: Her watch. A few pairs of shoes (inexpensive, primarily for sports). Shorts, t-shirts, a single blue dress worn at her graduation. A set of small notebooks, some cramped with looped writing, others with barely a glyph or mark in their pages. Passport photographs of her father when he was fifteen, in his early twenties, then in his fifties, just before he died. Her phone, which contained both an infinite number of memories and none at all. She had deleted everything months ago so that her screen only presented the date, time, and weather.
When she looked at her phone for the last time, she remembered distantly the memory of silly photographs of herself and her friends, screenshots of conversations, data that tracked her health and sleep patterns, and, less explicitly, where she went, how long she spent in coffee shops and public spaces, what she was buying and not buying. There had been an app that tracked her father’s glucose levels, and she looked at it often, as if the last molecular remnants of him were stored in that tiny blue square. But in the end, erasing it, along with everything else, was easier than she thought. Sentimentality was a privilege when things disappeared so often.
* * *
BACK IN THE CITY, people danced colorlessly. Music streamed from every speaker. Somewhere in the crowd, a woman with a poster in her hands screamed and screamed, but nobody could hear what she was saying—the orchestra of sound was so loud—and then she was gone. How or where she went nobody knew, although the entire event was filmed live and played back to the dancing masses. Their feet flowed the same circular lines, their cheeks swollen as if bitten by mosquitoes, thousands of them stepping and hopping and arching their limbs on the enormous flat screen, where everyone looked at themselves looking at each other.
* * *
ACROSS THE OTHER SIDE of the mountain, the group reached an abandoned theme park. Dozens of kiosks were out as if on standby, some cluttered with soft toys blistering in the sun. There was trash still in the bins, flossy and gray, soft with mold. Inside, the animal enclosures—aviary cages that once held parrots and cockatoos, the faux bamboo grove that had housed two pandas—were empty, although Frankie couldn’t tell how long they had been vacant.
