They Meet in the Wall
by Subodhana Wijeyeratne
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Table of Contents parts: 1, 2, 3 |
conclusion
Of course it cannot last and, in the end, it is a beast that ruins everything. When one kilometer-tall monstrosity attacks their segment of the Wall, Neiva and Vinay throw themselves into the blood and fire without a second thought. Together they shuttle the shattered and lacerated survivors of the confrontation down from where the creature’s tentacles — thick around as five men — took the guards unawares.
Neiva establishes a triage to tend to the unlucky who do not die straightaway and then, when the great guns are brought online, those whose eardrums have burst and skin has been scorched by the stone-shattering blasts that finally reduce the attacker to half-pulped body parts scattered across the waste.
It is when they are working together that one of the guards notices how they speak to each other. How familiar they seem to each other and how, when one flags, the other knows what to say for encouragement. He notices Neiva touching Vinay’s elbow briefly, Vinay touching her back.
He is jealous, and that is all it takes.
Neither knows about this. Nor do they know that the detective of the moral police eventually assigned to follow Neiva is dogged and dour and utterly without humour about what he does. Eventually he tracks her to Vinay’s room and spies on them from the building opposite.
He watches them peel each other out of their clothes and lock their lips as if the only air they could breathe was that which came out of the other’s lungs. He notes the time and summons the couple who live in the room he has requisitioned to act as witnesses. They do, silent and terrified beyond words.
Then he sits back and closes his eyes. He is not entirely without a heart, and he knows love when he sees it. He smokes a pipe and reads a book and, when he looks up, forty minutes or so later, they are both asleep. Only then does he signal out the window with a flashlight. Down in the murk below, someone responds in kind.
Ten minutes later, six police burst into Vinay’s room. He does not resist. He simply holds out his hands for them to cuff. But the policeman ignores them and kicks him in the ribs. He falls, coughing, and the policeman kicks him again. He keeps kicking until Vinay is gasping and sobbing and there is a thin film of blood on his teeth.
Through all this, Neiva screams. “Stop it! I command you!” she says. “I command you in the name of my mother!”
The policeman looks over at one of the others, and that one steps forward and punches her neatly across the face.
“Only drones fuck drones,” he says.
* * *
They frogmarch her to a dungeon not far away, where the raw concrete floors claw at the naked soles of her feet. The cells are recessed in darkness and, in some of them, the damned lean against the bars like the living corpses that they are. In others there is nothing but silence and the thick stink of rot. It is next to one of these that they throw her.
She spends an evening avoiding the mattress in one corner that smells like wet dog and secretes a brown ooze when she prods it with her finger. Eventually she does not so much fall asleep as allow herself to be swallowed by the oblivion she feels crowding in around her. In that insensate abyss she dreams of being chased by a roaring crowd, and they are all her mother, and they are all also Vinay and also the policeman who punched her.
She wakes when two guards open the cell door and scrambles to the other side of the cell, braced for their violence. But instead they fall to their knees and direct her out of the cell. When she leaves, they follow her on all fours. Her mother is waiting for her with the detective upstairs, where the fog-filtered sun tumbles in, dewy and warm, through the great windows in the lobby.
“Miss Sugorot,” says the detective.
“Doctor,” says Neiva. “Doctor Sugorot.”
Her mother smirks.
“Doctor,” says the policeman. “We owe you an apology.”
Neiva waits but he does not say anything else. She crosses her arms. “Apologize, then.”
“There appears to have been a mix-up. The drone has confessed to everything.”
Neiva blinks. “He has?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“You needn’t worry. We have the pictures in our custody, and he will not be able to blackmail you with them.”
“Black—? Where is he now?”
Her mother glances at her, eyes narrowed. A warning.
“Dead, of course. We sent him over the edge this morning.” The detective pauses. “Strangest execution I’ve ever seen.”
“What was strange?”
She can barely control her voice now. She can barely control her body. Her mother takes one trembling arm and pushes her slowly out the door.
“We didn’t need to push him,” says the policeman. “He jumped.”
He keeps speaking, but Neiva doesn’t hear the rest. As soon as they are on the palanquin, she curls up against the side wall and cries. But then her mother reaches over and cradles her head on her chest, and Neiva loses herself to her misery. This time she dreams of Vinay standing on the parapets, tipping slowly over the edge, the fog like a maw behind him. For some damn reason, he is smiling.
* * *
To avoid suspicion, she does not go looking for his things straightaway. Instead she focuses on her work and on getting the two policemen who struck her sentenced and then on having the sentence carried out on her section of the Wall. She goes with four guards to collect them when they are delivered, hands bound, glowering. As if it were she who had struck first. As if it were they who had been wronged.
They take a clattering cage-lift up one of the main shafts, up so high that the floor below dwindles to a dim, amber smear far beneath their feet. Then they march them through hall after hall where the drones tend to grumbling machines and heft giant gun-shells onto conveyors belts and crouch in clumps in the shadows, spoonlessly sipping gruel from bowls. Whatever they are doing, they stop and look and, at first, their eyes are wide. But then they narrow and, in them, Neiva sees the same malice she feels, and it no longer horrifies her that she has anything in common with the drones.
Up on the wall they strip the policemen naked. The guards stay close behind her when she takes their wrists, one by one, and announces their time of death. They do not resist when they guards push them over, but one spits in her face. “Whore,” he says. He says something else too, but by that time he is on his way down.
Afterwards she steps up to the parapet. The mist thins for an instant and, far below, she sees the ragged line of the dead. The freshly killed lie twisted and white-fleshed, and countless bones also, scattered and gleaming. She wonders who these thousands of people were and what crimes they had committed to be slain in this way. She wonders if perhaps they, too, were dogged to their deaths by someone like her. But, more than anything, she reels at how distance and time can reduce a whole life to nothing more than a few scattered shards obliviating into the muck.
This is how her thoughts begin to snarl up on themselves. This is how her dissatisfaction grows.
* * *
Vinay’s effects are kept in an old box in a room with countless other small boxes slumped in great piles stinking of mildew. Some of those at the bottom have been crushed beyond recognition, and whatever was in them has long turned to mush. More lives forgotten. More stories lost.
When she finds what she has been looking for, she takes it with shaking hands over to one of the desks and, in the harsh light of a hoodless bulb, she extracts a grubby little envelope. Inside are some cards of paper, glossy and sharp-edged, with images on them like she has never seen.
Pictures of Vinay and her together in places that they have never been to, doing things they have never done. Younger, in a hall somewhere. The background is lost to darkness but, on the table in front of them, are glasses like flower-buds half full of purple-red liquid and a spread of unfamiliar food, meats and crustaceans, piles of white grains.
There is another picture, of them on a beach. They are holding hands, and her head is on his shoulder. And then more. Her in a white dress like the mist had draped itself over her, a halo of white gauze over her head. He is kissing her. There are tears on both of their cheeks.
On the last page, he has written something: All that matters is that I got to see you again.
She expects to cry, but instead she is just exhausted, and so she sits back and stares at the light. Eventually she takes one picture. A memento of a girl who was not her but was, with the man she was meant to be with but wasn’t. Not for long, anyway.
That night, she heads back up the Wall. It is dark and there is no one but the guards patrolling the parapets, and they are far enough apart that she knows she will have plenty of time to do what she intends to do.
She takes the picture out and looks at it again by the moonlight and tries to imagine what it must have been like to be that woman, in that world, with him. But she can’t. They are not her memories and, though she tries, she cannot bring herself to think of the girl as her. She can only see her time with Vinay, here. She can only feel the hollowness of its having ended so soon.
She steps up onto the parapet, and looks down. The ground is lost in the shadow of the Wall. She takes a deep breath and prepares to jump.
And then a thought steals up on her like the shadow of a cloud. That if she was in his world and also in this one, perhaps he is, too. That if he crossed dimensions and found her, surely she could find him here.
She thinks of the pictures in the book. She thinks of the last image — the two of them holding a child, fat-cheeked and laughing. All three turned to each other. For a brief moment, she feels herself there. The child’s soft skin smooth against her cheek. Vinay’s arm on her shoulder and his scent in her nostrils. A tiny and radiant little world kindled between the three of them.
She sighs and climbs down.
Copyright © 2018 by Subodhana Wijeyeratne
