Текст книги "The Woodlands"

Автор книги: Lauren Nicolle Taylor

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

Whoosh! The sound of air escaping from somewhere startled me. But then a calm washed over my whole body and whatever startled me didn’t seem to matter anymore. Every muscle in my body relaxed and I felt myself sinking.

Whoosh! There was that sound again. I wondered where it was coming from, but at the same time I didn’t care. Curiosity was a vague shape, easily shelved. I felt at ease, peaceful and sleepy. But something sharp kept pushing up inside me and telling me to fight it, drag myself out of this strange fog. This peace was false.

I pricked my ears, feeling like I hadn’t used them in months. The whooshing sound had come from underneath the slim, metal-framed bed I was sitting on. I dragged my body up to sitting and rolled over and down the side of the bed. Every movement needed my full concentration and energy like I was moving through molasses. Once over the edge of the bed, I felt like I was dragging myself over the edge of a cliff, my legs dangling in the air. I gripped the cold, metal bars of the bed, feeling like I might fall miles and miles into a dark abyss. My body felt uncoordinated and unbalanced but I persisted, pulling my awkward form along the floor like a commando.

And there it was…

Underneath the bed was a tiny silver pipe with what looked like a little showerhead over it. “Whoosh!” A flush of cold, sweet smelling air hit my face and everything went dark.

I woke up back on my bed, with unfamiliar people crowded around me. Men and women in white coats, holding my arms up, pinching my toes, looking in my eyes with small, silver torches. I pursed my lips, trying to concentrate, but explanations seemed just out of reach. Were these doctors? Or perhaps scientists? In Pau, well, in the rings I had been to, there were a few people who dressed like this. They poured out of a dingy looking building in Ring Five at quitting time. They quickly shrugged off their white coats and shoved them in their packs as they walked home. Shedding their skin as they returned to their other, separate life back in the housing areas. Pau was like that—no one ever talked about what they did for a living. Pride was not a rewarded attribute.

“I think she must have rolled off, or fallen,” the tall man said. “I don’t think she’s compromised.” I tried hard not to raise an eyebrow at the word ‘compromised’.

The younger female smiled at me, patting my head soothingly. “You fell, darling. Try not to move while we examine you.” I felt like saying, I’m not a wounded animal, but at the same time, I wanted to snap at them like one.

A harsh voice barked, “Don’t bother, she can’t hear you. She’s not even registering that we are here.”

On closer inspection, I could see the kind, younger woman wore a flesh-colored facemask over her mouth and nose. This seemed important but important kept dissolving in front of me. I was trying to reach above the fog, trying to hold my breath and climb past it. Silver pipe, shower head.

A bloody taste developed in my mouth, filling it with metallic-flavored saliva. I felt dizzy. I leaned over the side of the bed, the room tipping and tilting, and vomited on the floor. The two women jumped back in unison. The tall man raised his eyebrows, displeased. He wasn’t fast enough. He had vomit on his shoes and halfway up his pants.

He looked down at his shoes and frowned. “Keep an eye on her and make sure she keeps her food down over the next day or so,” he muttered to the women and hurriedly exited the room, his pants making a wet, flapping sound as he walked.

I watched him go, struggling to remember why he had left so quickly. My brain was still foggy but the vomit cleared my head a little. Vomit, right. I pressed my fingers to my mouth, trying to suppress a smile. I had the feeling I shouldn’t smile or even show any emotion to these strange people.

After the younger woman had cleaned up my mess, she placed a tray in front of me and left. I held the large, paper cup in both hands and twisted it around, inspecting it. Carefully, I took a small sip. The milkshake inside tasted very familiar. I opened the lid and peered inside; it was grey and sludgy, the consistency of wet cement. The food looked more normal, some meat, cooked to death, mashed potatoes and peas. The food didn’t taste exactly right. It tasted more like the milkshake than mashed potatoes, and the meat taste like charred wood, but I found that I was starving. I ate a little, drank a little, very slowly. Thinking over what I thought I had worked out.

This fog I was lost in was something they were doing to me. The masks meant it could be something inhaled.

“Whoosh!” I instinctively pulled the bedclothes over my face, trying to block out the invisible poison. A silver pipe pushed up into my memory. Had I seen something or heard something? I wasn’t sure but the picture in my head was clear, a silver pipe. I pulled myself over and out of the bed, realizing for the first time that I was attached to several lines and monitors. Still holding a sheet over my face, I clambered towards the wall under my bed, the shiny grey floor reflecting my face as I crawled along. I looked thin, well, thinner. My odd eyes popped out of my head, framed by purple circles. When did my hair get so long? I ducked under the metal bed and there it was, a silver pipe and a tiny showerhead attached to it. As quickly as I could, I shoved the sheet over the opening, hearing a muffled ‘whoosh’ as I sat back on my knees.

I wrung my hands together, thinking. I couldn’t leave the sheet there. They would work it out and I wasn’t sure what I was going to do yet. I needed them to think nothing had changed. I needed to find something else to seal the opening to that pipe. My eyes searched the room, really seeing it for the first time. There was nothing I could use. It was so bare. Four painted walls, a sink, a door leading to a bathroom, and shiny grey tiles climbing halfway up the wall. There were some things I recognized, items from my room. The small details were there, but enough was changed that it now felt very wrong.

I stood up too quickly, feeling very light-headed. I held myself up against the side of the bed and took it in. It was bizarre. A lot of the details were actually painted onto the walls. My dresser with the few ornaments I possessed—a bottle of perfume, a book. All two-dimensional representations of the real thing. How could I possibly have believed this was real? I pulled my fingers through my hair, snagging them on all the knots. The looming question that was now flashing in my brain like a broken streetlight was—how long had I believed this was real?

The perfume bottle that used to sit on my dresser in my bedroom looked so real, the green faceted glass glinted in some nonexistent sunlight. I reached out to touch it, feeling only cold, hard wall. The bottle was now reflected on my hand. I removed it sharply, like the image would somehow stain my skin, but of course it returned to the wall. I searched the ceiling and located a little camera or, I guess, projector, streaming light over this one wall. It was a photo from one corner of my bedroom at home.

I thought of the perfume bottle. It had never moved from that position, the whole time I lived in that house. It was empty, had always been empty. It was a gift my father had given my mother. When he left, she threw everything away, except that. She gave it to me one night before Paulo had come home from work, placing it carefully on my dresser. She didn’t say anything except, “Here, I don’t want this anymore,” and stole out of the room like a thief. Thinking about Mother was strange, almost new, like I was reinventing a long-lost memory, colors and shapes swirling, mixing together in confusion. Her face faded in and out as an unseen force pushed her away from me.

Scanning the room again, I realized there was one real thing on the wheeled table across my bed. The food. I scooped up some mashed potato in my fingers and crawled underneath the bed again. Dragging machines with me, their wheels squeaking and whistling painfully, I edged closer to my target. Carefully, I unscrewed the head of the pipe and shoved the potato into it, placing the showerhead back over the top. I rolled back on my heels and sighed. No more whooshing.

As my head cleared, memories assaulted me one by one. Joseph, warmth and love that turned twisted and hard, Rash and the boys, something to live for, a purpose, and a new family. It hurt so much. It was a real, physical pain. I breathed long and slow, trying to calm myself. I made a decision. At this moment, in this already overwhelming and frightening situation, I would push it down. I couldn’t acknowledge this pain, this loss, not without falling apart. It would have to wait.

It would have to wait because that morning one thing became very apparent and, all of a sudden, glaringly obvious. I stared down at my round belly and sighed thinly with absolute exhaustion. I was pregnant, probably about four or five months. Looking back over the foggy days, it made a lot more sense. How starving-hungry I was, how uncoordinated and unbalanced I felt, and the way I was being treated by the staff. What I couldn’t understand or remember was how I came to be this way.

I’d tried to hide it the first time I remembered being taken to the exercise yard, but I couldn’t help a sharp suck of breath in shock. It was difficult not to reel backwards, turn to the door, and run. There, padding their socked feet over the fake grass, the projected trees not swaying in the wind, the birds frozen on the branches, were at least a hundred girls walking around the yard. All at different stages, but most were quite obviously pregnant. They were all being ushered into different circuits that were roped off with nylon tape and were mindlessly walking through them. They would bang into each other occasionally, unaware of their swollen stomachs bouncing into each other’s backs. There was no sound apart from the soft swishing of padded feet on the fake grass. I looked up at the bright blue sky decorated with puffy white clouds projected on the ceiling and wished it were real. This was nightmarish.

The kinder blonde woman, whom I’d learned was named Apella, guided me to an opening in the chattel and gently pushed me through. I walked with my eyes set on the ground, trying not to attract any attention. I felt like a spy—the only one aware of what had happened to us.

After a week of the same routine, I realized Apella was always putting me behind the same girl in the yard. She had short, black springy hair and a downcast posture. Her hands looked raw, like she had been nervously scratching them. Once she tripped and I heard her whisper, “Whoops”. No one ever spoke in these lines—no one really noticed they were in a line.

I watched her carefully. She always kept her head down, but every now and then I saw her head dash from side to side, taking in the surroundings as I had been doing. Counting the number of guards, ten, looking at the exits, only one. The other thing I noticed was she would occasionally rub her belly. It didn’t appear to be by accident, it was affectionately, comfortingly. I decided she must be at least slightly aware, as I was, and decided I had to speak with her.

Back in my room, I tried to think of some way I could make this happen and came up with nothing. I could bang into her in the yard, but with the total silence how could I speak without being noticed? I could give her a note, but I had nothing to write with and no paper. It seemed hopeless—whatever was going to happen would happen. I had no control. I pushed the wheeled table away from me in frustration, quickly retrieving it, hoping no one had heard the noise. That was the first night I spent crying myself to sleep. I lost count of how many nights I let myself be this way. I was a pathetic creature with no hope and no faith.

Then I felt it. At night, after much sobbing, it moved inside me. A tiny kick, a snare on the inside of me. I felt ill. Poisoned. It had moved into my body without permission, without me knowing. I wished I could cut it out, be rid of it. Whatever this thing was, I didn’t want it. I wanted my life back. I resented sharing my body with this parasite. I resolved I would hold out long enough to get it out. I would find a way to be me again.

The days started to blur. I got bigger and bigger. The routine never changed. The girl in front of me never turned around and I never spoke to her. I felt lost and so very alone. I decided I should make a run for it, but I didn’t even know where we were or how far underground.

Then one day it was not Apella that led me to exercise, it was some other woman. A much older, less gentle woman, who shoved me into the line with her cracked, weathered hands, scratched and gnarled like a tree branch. I was nowhere near the springy-haired girl. I scraped my feet along the fake grass for forty-five minutes or an hour, I don’t know how long, and then tree lady pulled me out of the line and shoved me back to my room.

I walked through the doors and thought she must have led me to the wrong room. It was completely different. The woman roughly led me to my bed and sat me down, chucking my legs up and raising the rail, like she was handling a sack of grain. I tried not to look around too much, but it was difficult. When she left, I let my eyes wander over the new pictures. The photos had been changed, a lot. On one side was a condensed version of my room. On the other side was a different scene. It was darker and dirtier than my side, but it had more ornaments. All handmade. Exquisite little dolls made of sticks and colorful cloth, sitting on dark, wooden shelves amongst glass jars full of buttons, ribbons, and shards of glass. I couldn’t help myself. I had to look closer. I left my bed and approached. Thankfully, a few days after the falling ‘incident’, they had disconnected me from the machines so I was free to move around my room. Each doll had its own personality. I reached out to touch them, my hands shaky. They looked so real. One little doll had dark, springy hair and beautiful, ebony skin. Her dress was detailed with tiny glass shards, each sewn on in a swirly pattern like the dance of a wind that had blown past a tree and picked up all the leaves. I sighed. I missed the trees. The silky purple color of her dress was deep and foreign. We didn’t have such colors in Pau. The face of the doll was painted on in such detail. The kindness of her face was unmistakable. Whoever made these was very talented. A lot of love had gone into these toys. I stepped back, feeling like I was intruding into someone’s very personal sanctuary. I heard the door creaking and quickly climbed back into the bed, to resume staring at the wall, when they wheeled her in.

I was to share a room. The girl’s stomach was much bigger than mine—perhaps she only had a few weeks left. I had memorized the back of her head so well that it was strange to see her face. It was not at all what I had pictured. I imagined a strong face, the face of someone older and wiser than me. Someone who could help me. What greeted me was the face of a child. She couldn’t be more than fourteen. She was beautiful: smooth, perfect ebony skin, and kind, dark eyes that looked completely unlike mine. They were full of hope—this was not the face of someone who had given up. She looked almost happy. Her face mirrored the doll’s, only younger.

I heard the staff talking to each other. “I don’t know what they are thinking, ordering more. We are crowded here as it is,” one woman said.

“I know, now there is only one of us to ten of them. I don’t know how we are going to manage it,” someone whined.

“And with the exercises and the room changes, I’ve barely slept in days.”

“A happy mother equals a healthy baby. Right?” I heard laughing.

“Well, what choice do we have? What Este wants, Este gets,” the other voice replied in a sigh.

Este. That meant we were probably near Bagassa. Superior Este had a reputation as a formidable woman, harsh and brilliant. Her assignment was the Sciences. We were part of one her experiments. I wondered what this girl had done to end up here. I knew what my crime was.

I could hear them complaining as they walked down the hall, until they passed someone who shushed them. Then the woman with the harsh voice stormed into the room. Apella was right behind her.

“Apella, can you connect, er, um...” She lifted the young girl’s arm up to a portable scanning device, which responded in its monotone, “Clara Winterbell.”

“Err, Clara, yes, can you connect Clara to the monitors and organize her dinner?” She crinkled her face, her straight, grey hair looking messy. Bits of it had fallen out of her tight bun and were floating wispily in front of her eyes.

Harsh Voice seemed stressed and distracted. She wiped her forehead, attempting to push back the stray hairs. Every other time I had seen her, she was businesslike, efficient and disconnected. Whatever had happened, she was obviously frazzled by it. Apella, on the other hand, who was normally nervous by comparison, was calm and seemed almost pleased. She hooked Clara up to the various machines and monitors, tucked the dopey girl into bed, and walked out. As she passed through the door, she turned and I think she smiled at us. The door shut and we were alone.

Clara sat staring at the wall for a while. Then her hand lifted to the shelves projected onto her side of the room and caressed the doll I had been looking at. I could tell this doll meant a great deal to her. I could also tell, for certain, that she was not under the fog, as her face was running through a myriad of emotions. I couldn’t tell if she was happy or sad.

“This is my mother,” she whispered as she turned her head, only slightly, in my direction, her eyes still on the wall. “We have been apart a long time.” Her movements seemed very careful as she turned to face me. Her face was hard with resolve as she said, “I am going to see her again, and you will see your family again, Rosa Bianca.”

A small spark of hope ignited inside of me. Maybe this girl knew something I didn’t. “How do you know my name?” I asked, trying hard not to lose my cool. Trying to whisper and keep calm so the staff didn’t notice our talking.

“Apella told me,” she said nonchalantly.

“What else did she tell you? I asked.

“That I could trust you,” she smiled, “that we would be friends.” She patted her belly. The look on her face was so ridiculous, given our situation. She looked relaxed, like we’d just met at the grocery store. Not like a trapped, pregnant girl who had been drugged and god knows what else.

“Yeah, sure,” I said, rolling my eyes. “We can be friends.” Friends, a rather pointless thing to have in our current condition. Allies maybe. I wondered why Apella had spoken to her. Why she had pushed us together was also a mystery to me. So was Clara’s odd demeanor. Was she crazy?

“So you worked out the gas—how long did it take you?” she asked.

“It must be about three weeks ago.”

“Oh,” she said as she looked down at her belly again. “I have been awake for a lot longer than that, maybe about four months, though time is hard to measure here, isn’t it?” she said, giggling. I felt sorry for her. Perhaps she had been driven crazy from being down here so long, with no one to talk to. I wanted to reach over and pat her head.

I tried to keep the sarcasm out of my voice when I replied, “Yeah I guess. So how old are you, Clara?”

“Seventeen.”

I guess the surprise on my face was quite evident.

“Yeah, I get that a lot. I’m just petite. Well, that’s what my mother always used to say. I’m tiny but mighty!” She held her tiny, thin arms up as if showing off her muscles.

I laughed. She was as cute as a button. There was something about her that I couldn’t resist. She was unhateable. Likeable. Where I was suspicious and guarded, she was warm and honest. We talked for quite a while. I asked her loads of questions. She asked me some but eased off when she worked out she was only getting one-word answers. She seemed happy to share her past with me, and it was better than staring at the wall. She talked of her love for her family. About her deep respect and admiration for her hard-working father, who worked on a large farm fixing machinery and her devotion to her mother, who taught her how to make her dolls. She explained that her mother used to make toys for the Superiors’ children. When she asked about my family I kept it brief and, sensing my reluctance, she never pushed me.

Clara talked incessantly about her home. “Palma, Ring Five!” she exclaimed, holding her hand up in mock salute. She went on to describe her home, her tiny little head nodding up and down as if attached to a spring, as she spoke. Her full, dark lips talking so fast it was hard to keep up. Palma sounded identical in size and shape to Pau Brasil but the people were different. My town was consumed with fear, where everyone watched their every move and tried so hard not to draw any attention to themselves. Palma was ruled by their love for each other. They poured themselves into creative work. They had art and stories not written in the standard, supplied history books. They even had people that made and played instruments. I was shocked. I thought all the towns were the same. That we were all in the same immovable boat, entrenched in thick, binding mud we could never pull ourselves out of. These people sounded crazy or brave, I wasn’t sure. I was shocked and so very jealous. So very jealous, until I heard how the people of Palma suffered.

“How can you do things like that? I mean, how can you get away with it, without being punished?” I asked eagerly.

She scrunched up her thin, pointed nose, “Oh, we’ve been punished.” She shook her head, recalling. “Once I saw I woman beaten to death in the street for not surrendering a simple wood pipe.”

I looked at her, puzzled. “You mean, for smoking?”

She shook her head, smiling, “No, an instrument. You blow on it to make music.” She showed me the Y shape of it by drawing it in the air and then held the invisible pipe to her lips and blew. I nodded and pretended I knew what she was talking about. What was music? “This woman fought with a policeman. The pipe had been given to her by her son, who had just left for the Classes a month earlier. She knew she would never see him again and this was all she had to remind her of him. I remember her holding onto it so tightly as the policeman tried to twist it from her fingers. They kicked her and kicked her until there was nothing left, wrenching it from her dead hands and throwing it in the bin. Others tried to intervene and they were arrested. They just disappeared. We have lost hundreds of lives trying to protect what we love.”

I recalled the heartless couple, wincing as I remembered all that blood.

I felt relieved, as stupid as it sounds, that at least one thing remained the same. They still took the children to the Classes. This, we all had in common. Still, I was quite shaken by this revelation. The people of Pau Brasil had removed their feelings. Parents were merely caretakers. I mean, I understood the reasoning behind it. What was the point of loving someone so much for eighteen years who was going to be taken away from you? I loved my mother and she loved me, but it was understood that this was always going to be temporary. So we kept each other at a distance. She’d had to say goodbye to her parents all those years ago, when she went to the Classes, and we had known my time was coming. It was foolish to care that much—it served no purpose. The way Clara’s people functioned made no sense to me. The love that she felt for her parents, her friends, what she called her ‘community’ was self-destructive in my mind. I didn’t understand it. Nor did I understand her love for that thing inside her. I didn’t get it but my heart longed for it. I had lost so much because of caring about things. I touched my stomach very gently. I wasn’t sure my heart could ever love that way again.

A woman arrived with dinner and we returned to our drone-like state. Clara was a pro at looking dazed and dopey. But she was still so cheeky, taking risks I never would. When the woman’s back was turned, she poked out her tongue. We ate in silence, waiting until the woman returned to take our plates. She checked our milkshake cups to make sure they were empty and left.

Lights out.

“Do you know what’s in those milkshakes?” I whispered in the dark. But Clara was already asleep. I could hear her soft breathing and restless movements as I tried to sleep myself. That quiet sound of air escaping her lips was the best sound in the world to me. It felt good not to be alone anymore. I excitedly made a note of all the questions I needed to ask her in the morning, knowing I would probably forget most of them.