Authors: Kameron Hurley
“Don’t narrate,” I told it. “I just
want to touch you.” But the body could not be silent. None of them could. It
existed to narrate.
As the open scream of its mouth
moved to form words, I ran my gaze across its form. The body lay flat on the
floor, both arms raised up as if to shield itself from harm. From the torso
downward, the body seemed to liquefy and spill across the floor. A section of
the scalp and skull was missing on one side so you could see the shiny little
chip embedded into the soft tissue. The eyes were always open.
My hands trembled. I knelt down
beside the body and traced the jagged blue tattoos on its flesh with my
fingers.
I wondered if it could feel
pleasure, or anything at all. Anger? Loneliness? Or did the keepers order the
archivists to deaden that too, as they deadened the body’s flesh?
“So sad,” I said. I moved my
fingers down the torso, to the mass of featureless flesh. I stared at the wide
glassy eyes, brown as dust.
A gorgeous text.
I pulled my hands off the body and
fumbled at the knot on my robe. I struggled out of the robe, and I was already
erect. I wanted to be inside the body, to join my flesh to the body’s, to
become one text, the altered and the empty.
Only the mouth was open to me, wide
and wet and full of teeth. My body shook with fear and anticipation. I wanted
to silence the text.
I entered gently, and the text
cupped its lips around me, permissive.
The words stopped. History stopped.
I spilled myself into the body,
into the history of the keepers. I fell back onto the floor and was dizzy.
Giddy. Terrified.
The text drank me in silence. I
stared at the text and then back out into the hallway, afraid. What would the
keepers think of a student that silenced their history? I tied my robe closed
and ran from the niche, back to the main archives. My whole body trembled. I
expected one of the overseers to find me, to say the keepers had seen what I’d
done and would purge me.
Yet no one came for me. The other
students continued to ignore me. The overseers still let me explore the
archives alone.
I became addicted.
At the end of each class I went
back to the far corners of the archives. I buried myself in texts. I silenced
them. They choked on me. Silence the texts, silence the keepers, silence the
world. I was an ugly empty text, but I had power over all of them.
I do not know how many texts I took
pleasure in this way. Always I returned to my favorite, and told it to tell me
its story in a different way, but it could not tell a story that was not true.
So I spilled myself into it, altering the text as I knew I should not - could
not. There was no one to stop me.
Until.
I withdrew and licked the mouth of
the text, and heard:
“What are you doing?”
The voice was not the text’s.
I fell back onto my robe and kicked
away from the text. One of the other students stood in the corridor, staring at
me with large, dark eyes.
“I’m…” I said, putting my arms
through the sleeves of my robe with limbs that felt clumsy. “I’m touching the
texts.”
“You’re defiling them,” she said.
“You’re silencing them. That’s obscene.”
“No,” I said, and knotted my robe
closed. I managed to stand on wobbly legs. “I was just –”
“I watched you,” she said. “You’re
that strange body, that violent body, the one they brought in from the
compounds. Anish.”
She was older than I was, nearly an
archivist already. I had seen her before, assisting in the cleaning of texts.
“Yes,” I said.
“Why are you touching the body
texts?”
“Because all of you are so
ugly
.”
She laughed. When she laughed she
threw back her head, and a snarl of dark black hair came loose from her twisted
braid of hair. It curled down along the side of her face, touched the empty,
appalling smoothness of her cheek.
“One doesn’t touch the body of
another,” she said. “One only touches texts. Haven’t you been taught that?” She
knitted her dark brows so they formed one line above her eyes. “Do you think
you understand them better, because you’ve spilled yourself into them?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“They why do you do it?” she said.
She stepped up into the niche. She approached the flat, featureless end of the
text.
“I don’t know,” I said. “You’ve never
done it?”
“You really are a dumb body, aren’t
you?” She unknotted her robe, held it open. Her body was not straight and flat
like mine, and she had no external male organs. She looked to me like most of
the partial texts I fucked at the compounds; those texts I thought had been
altered. She taught me the pronouns I use now.
“They cut you?” I said.
She retied the robe. “No. I was
born this way, in the birthing centers.”
“Then you won’t understand,” I
said.
“Show me how you touch them,” she
said. I recognized a desire there, in her eyes, her voice, as if she held up a
mirror to my own. No other empty text had ever approached and spoken to me.
I reached for her hand.
“Don’t touch me,” she said.
We knelt over the body of the text.
“Here,” I said, and moved my
fingers up to the wire around the head. “Feel how cold the wire is. Imagine the
way it feels, to have your flesh try to grow around it.”
She touched the wires with hesitant
fingers. I saw that her hands trembled. Did she have the same desire I had? The
same fear and anticipation?
I moved my palms down across the
jagged welts, traced them with my fingers. “They won’t hurt you,” I said.
She, too, ran her fingers along the
tattoos, down across the throat, the shoulders, the chest. “I’m not afraid,”
she said.
But she
was
afraid of them.
I knew it even then.
“Do they feel anything?” she said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “We’re not
allowed to ask, and I don’t like them to talk.”
I traced a line of tattoos that
brought my fingertips to hers. Our fingers touched. She looked at our hands
there, joined atop the text.
She withdrew her fingers from mine.
“I told you not to touch me,” she said. She stood up to walk away.
“Wait!” I said. “What are you
called?”
“I don’t tell dumb bodies such
things,” she said. She jumped out of the niche and into the hallway.
I did not see her for many days
afterward. The overseers had deemed my independent study complete, and they
lumped me back into a student group, this time a group watching the dictation
sessions. The art of dictation was the most difficult an archivist had to
learn. I had already accompanied the archivists on feeding and cleaning
sessions, but it was the dictation that most interested me. Here I could
perfect bodies with my own hands.
Sometimes I snuck away from a
feeding session early and wandered the lonely corridors, passed row upon row of
texts. Sometimes I came to corridors that had been barred off with a thick
steel gate. These were the libraries that had already been purged. I had
watched the archivists unhook the bodies from the tubing that bound them to the
floors of their niches. The archivists carted the bodies out on long wheeled
trolleys. Piles of bodies. When I asked why they had to get rid of them I was
always given the same answer.
“The keepers are dying. We must
conserve only the most important truth.”
But who decided what the most
important truth was?
So I walked down the long halls,
passing those texts the keepers still retained, and I searched for the student
I’d touched over the text. I often dreamed of her. In those days my dreams of
her were pleasant ones – out bodies entwined, my mouth on her skin. The dreams
sickened me at first. She was ugly, incomplete. What kind of a body had I
become?
Yet my desire for her was so great
that I did not eat or sleep or visit the texts for three days while I looked
for her. When I found her she was just outside one of the barred corridors,
following a train of archivists carting out obsolete texts.
“Anish,” she said.
“What are you called?” I said.
We stared at one another.
I wanted her name, as if knowing
that, I could own her and begin to fill her emptiness.
“Help me with the cleaning of the
texts,” she said.
“Yes,” I said.
She told my overseer that she
wished to work with me, and my overseer agreed without hesitation.
She strode quickly back down to the
archival corridors, so fast on her long legs that I had to struggle to keep up.
She did not go down the long individual history corridor where most of the
other students clustered. Instead, she took me back to the Unmaking Hall where
those exquisite texts of the end of human freedom were still held.
She stepped up into one of the
empty niches. She gazed around at the clean floor, the bare walls. “We took
this one out today,” she said.
I climbed up beside her. “Did you
burn it?” I asked.
She nodded.
“They aren’t going to recopy it?” I
said.
“No. This corridor must be cleaned
out by the end of the year. The keeper who oversaw its maintenance is dead.”
“Dead? What about its own history?”
“It’s already written on one of the
bodies in the individual history corridor. It will survive in that, at least.”
She gazed out into the hall, and I saw her look turn inward. “I want you to
touch me, Anish, here, where the text would be.”
I shivered.
She untied the knot of her robe,
let the gray material fall open. “I want you to touch me the way you touch the
texts.”
She stepped directly in front of
me. She reached out and unknotted my robe. She was so close I felt the heat of
her body; her breath on my skin. I gazed at the flesh of her, the smooth,
brown, hideously unmarred flesh. She was uglier than I was.
She placed her palm on my chest. I
was trembling.
“I won’t hurt you,” she said.
“I know that,” I said.
She pushed off her robe, and it
piled around her ankles.
I wrapped my arms around her. She
pulled our bodies together. For the first time since my arrival in the
archives, I found myself pressed against a body that not only responded to
mine, but wanted me there against it. This was all I had dreamed of doing
during the terrible loneliness of those nights when I wrapped my empty arms
around myself, trying to fill them.
We ended up on the floor that had
until that day been housed by a body text, rubbing our bodies together against
the same floor it had been displayed upon.
I tried to fuck every part of her,
to join with her as I had the texts, but she pushed me away from her mouth and
thighs and forced me down onto my chest, against the hard, slick floor. She
pressed her whole body down onto mine, wrapped her strong hands around my
throat.
“I own all the bodies here, Anish.
Even you,” she said.
“Let me fuck you,” I said, and my
breath condensed against the shiny floor.
She laughed at me, released me.
I struggled up and tried to grab
her the way I’d often been grabbed in the compounds, grabbed and entered. But
she cried out in pain when I gripped her. She pushed me away with a strength I
did not expect.
“You hurt me!” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said, and wondered
how I had hurt her. This is what we had done in the compounds, all of us. The
pain and fear and pleasure all went together.
“Don’t ever hurt me again,” she
said. “If you hurt me again I’ll burn you, Anish, just like the texts.”
“I won’t hurt you,” I said. I would
have promised her anything to be able to touch her.
She hit me then, across the mouth.
I gasped at the shock of it, but I desired her as I desired the beautiful
bodies of my youth. She brought pain and pleasure and fear.
“Touch me, but never hurt me,” she
said. “Understand that, dumb body?”
“What are you called?”
She turned away from me, jumped
down out of the niche, and gazed back up at me with her big, dark eyes.
“I am Chiva,” she said, “and I am
to be the librarian. Your body, all of these bodies, are mine, to do with as I
please. Don’t forget that, Anish. We touch only when I want to. You understand
that, dumb body?”
Chiva wanted only unaltered bodies,
those ugly texts like me. She liked me best, she said, because I desired the
texts, and she found that so revolting that I became desirable to her, she
said. We spent our days entwined among texts, and I reveled in the feel of her
body against mine. For me, it was enough. My loneliness had ended, and the
archives were no longer so cold and empty to me. Chiva told the overseers she
was instructing me, and most of the time they did not argue with her. I learned
that there were not enough overseers to look after us anymore, and the few that
remained were happy to pass my training on to Chiva, even though she had no
direct link to a keeper. She was as free as an empty text could be.
Sometimes she and I simply sat in
observance of texts and listened to them narrate their histories. We lay in one
another’s arms as the bodies told us a truth that would no longer exist by the
year’s end. Chiva often wanted me to help her when the archivists purged
another text, but I refused.
“We just have to unhook them and
put them on the cart,” she said, but I left her to it and ran off down the
winding corridors to find a quiet space. I did not like to watch them take the
texts away.
I remember once when we lay across
the body she had first seen me spill myself into. We both curled up next to it,
told it to narrate, but did not listen. Instead, we spoke together in our soft
lover’s voices, heads bent forward, bodies touching.
“We have to burn them down until
they’re just ash,” she said.
“Why do you have to talk of it?” I
said. Sometimes I thought she took delight in the burning of the texts.