Stories for Chip (52 page)

He is on a treadmill.

He is climbing a wall.

He is spinning in a wheel.

He is the Vitruvian man spinning in a wheel.

He is gathering light mites on a dust planet.

He is in a pressurized suit gathering buds that wilt to his touch.

He is in a room that is too hot, naked, and the men who drone around him, they are dying now, clinging to rails, lying at his very feet, gasping for air, starved, their once long and flowing capes now soiled and tattered and scrunched into balls.

He is in a small pod, closing the hatch, locking his seatbelt when a hologram blinks on from a dial in his arm.

“What are you doing? This is not how this ends. FINISH YOUR OBJECTIVE.”

He reaches into his arm, passing his hand through the flickering image of a craggy faced white man in a black robe. “FINISH YOUR OBJECTIVE.”

“I've got a new objective.” He rips the dial out of his arm; it is longer than he thought, about 10 inches, it is wet with blood and pus, it's nervy, wiry endings alive like tentacles. He throws it across the pod, and—“Fiiiinn n n nisssssssssssssshhhh—” smashes it! With all of his might!

He is in space.

He is in outer space, drifting through the cosmos, appearing before the black hole that's sucking the air out of the atmosphere of one hundred nearby planets, that's eating one hundred nearby suns. He is a circle spinning on a Starbucks cup. He is a sore on man's neck, a pulsing virus. He is traveling on a photon in the spray of the pale blue light from a 25-cent porno booth video monitor.

He is going home.

C.

Marcus sat in Curtis's new car. It was a hybrid. It was weird.

“Don't you love it?”

Marcus felt the dashboard; the leather was crisp. “Well, it's new all right.”

“What? Aren't you happy for me?”

“Happy that you've finally stopped trying to snort all of the coke in the world? Happy that you stopped trying to fuck every underaged circuit boy in Center City? Happy that your last temp job stuck and that you got promoted? Yes. Yes, I am happy.”

“Ooo, little Ms. Epilogue over here is ssshhaaaddddyy! Why I have to be all of that?”

“I'm sorry, Curtis…that was wrong of me. Yes, yes. I'm quite happy for you.”

They were crossing the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, listening to 90s club hits. When LaBouche's “Be My Lover” came on, Marcus's countenance changed. He slumped back, curling into the seatbelt. Curtis looked over and saw that his friend wasn't laughing anymore.

“This was the song playing when I first saw him sitting there, watching me dance.”

There was a pause. Curtis hesitated, then, putting his hand very gently on Marcus's thigh, said, “Hey, don't be sad, ok? I mean, I—I never knew what you saw in him anyway, he was so fucking—weird…”

“Curtis. Stop the car. Stop the car now.”

Marcus got out, despite Curtis's huffing in protest. Leaning in to the car, Marcus said, “I saw in him…yes, he was weirdo. But he was my weirdo. And that's all that really mattered.”

Marcus turned back up the bridge, flagging down a bus and riding into the thick of the city. He went to all the places that Henry had loved to go to. He stayed in that city center all night, letting the roar of a Phillies game in a leather bar wash over him. He paid the $10 to get into the hipster night at the club that used to be TRINITY, listened to the beat but just sat on the same barstool where he'd first caught a glimpse of the man he loved. Then, he went to the porn theater. In the years they'd fallen in and out of love, much had changed in the city. The gay neighborhoods had been slowly swallowed up by rich yuppies and their trendy Indian-Bulgarian fusion restaurants, toddler fashion boutiques, and stores that sold nothing but soap. Long ago, the authorities had rounded up all the vogueing kids and closed down the pizza joints and food trucks that sometimes sold marijuana to late-night partiers. But the porno shop was still there, buzzing and bright, smelling of Freon and chlorine, peopled with the usual junkies, lawyers, priests, and teenaged goths. He sat in the booth where he first kissed Henry. “IF YOU'RE GONNA SIT IN THE BOOTHS YOU GOTTA PAY,” the man watching yelled.

And so, when he put in his quarter, the ground shook. At first it was a slight tremor. A very light, barely-registering murmur of the earth. Then the screen got jittery, blacking in and out. The doorknob rattled and before Marcus could say “Occupied,” the entire store went black. A deafening roar ripped through it, doors to booths flew open. Air swirled and sucked itself up and out, blowing away the glass windows, shaking loose bricks. On the screen, there was a circle, painted black, spinning around, a rainbow wave peeking out of its edges. In the middle of floor, an object was growing, pushing its way into the planet, ablaze with a synesthetic fire. The other patrons seemed oblivious to it. They continued walking casually throughout the store. One of them asked Marcus if he was all right.

Marcus stared at the object in the ground. It stopped growing. It stopped glowing. It was just a bud, a kernel of a seed, etched now by the atmosphere. He bent over and touched it, watched it wither and die. Then, calmly, he stood up, and said, “Yes. Yes, I'm all right.”

Geetanjali Dighe

I've had enough. I can't stand this anymore. I'm sick to my stomach of waiting for dying men, women, children to appear. To index their lives. To find a way to escape from Mumbai. Wait. Index. Hide. Over and over.

Another skyscraper tumbles in the distance. It's the Destroyer; she is closing in.

I don't think I can keep Nisha safe any longer. The thought makes me shake. The wrench drops from my hand and fills the balcony with a clatter. I clench my fists till my knuckles go white. The panic attack passes, and I take in a long breath. Exhale. The air smells of salt, mildew, and rot.

Nisha and I are on a balcony on the 25th floor of Windermere in Powai. The lake has long since dried. We are the only ones left in the city.

On this tiny balcony, Nisha has made some space for us by sweeping stacks of overflowing paper into the apartment. There is nothing in the sky except an August waning gibbous moon. The Destroyer has taken away the stars. But she will not take Nisha away from me.

Below, lights shine on an empty street. The breeze pushes paper (so much paper!) and plastic bags. Cans roll about like empty skulls. The traffic lights blink green, yellow, and red, for no one.

There could be worse things than losing Nisha, I tell myself. What if the Destroyer finds me first? What will Nisha do then? I push the thought away. I force the shaking to stop. Does she worry, I wonder. She does not show it. She has indexed so many lives, she is so full of information that she can barely communicate anything anymore. Her memories and the indexed data are beginning to get mixed. Brahma's Last Day is near, she said once, her voice calm, her lovely face without a trace of fear.

She's busy scanning the pavement for a dying man as I put the last screw on the telescope stand.

Let's build a telescope, I'd said. I had a hunch that the Destroyer was doing something to the moon. Besides, the project gave us a purpose while we wandered in the city, along its abandoned highways and through deserted intersections. We scavenged for parts, cylinders, mirrors, and lenses and rigged this scope. We've taken spare parts from dusty shops in Lamington Street, from rusting metal-cutting factories in Ghatkopar, and haunting antique shops in Colaba. The shanties…we don't care to walk into them anymore.

How did we arrive here? Why are we here? I am no longer certain. I've begun to disintegrate like everything around us. I don't know who I am. I don't know what my purpose is. I think I used to know, but my memory seems to have overflowed like the sewers of Andheri.

“Is your moon up yet? Let's get indexing!” Nisha says as I spread the steel legs of the tripod on which I am about to mount the scope. She is cheerful. It melts my heart. I walk toward the balcony's railing and scan the horizon. Nisha hugs me from behind, then massages my neck and shoulders. When did I begin to love Nisha? I tremble: even this memory I cannot access.

Nisha is beautiful, dark. She is like her name—night, darkness—like a dark granite goddess set in the recesses of an ancient shrine. She is powerful with the weight of indexing the world's prayers, hopes, wishes, and dreams. Plump, rounded, full, alive. She says I am feminine, mysterious. She can't see, of course. She can only comprehend time, a little in the future, that's how she indexes the world. She can never see me as I am, and calls me Chaayaa—shadow; what is the shadow of darkness I wonder. I was powerful once, I think, and a shadow is what's left of me now. I've asked her how she can love me, not knowing who I am wholly. She says love's like that. Love loves.

I'm like her in many ways. Dark and longhaired. Strong willed. But more and more I find someone strange staring back at me when I look at my reflection. Nisha, in her philosophical calmness, says we are all headless. Try, she says. Point your finger at anything and then call out its name. And then do that to your head. I have done that many times. Point finger—this slum. Point finger—that dance bar. This sewer. That high rise. This thing. That thing. And then I point to my head. There is headless-ness in me. I see nothing. Nisha loves me nonetheless.

Nisha keeps the history, the memory, and the data of this world-line. It's an immense index. She has littered the whole city with the record of every life, every interaction, every instance, every relation, and their interconnections to everything else. She has built copies and back-ups of the copies to save the information from the Destroyer. She has printed the data and stacked the pages in alleys, shops, stadiums, and floors of every skyscraper. She has indexed, copied, backed up so much data that Mumbai cannot hold it anymore. The concrete buildings seem to be giving in to the weight of the information. Floors are collapsing. Roofs are caving in. Spindles of rebar punch in the ruins.

From the balcony, through the haze, I see structures in the distance and wonder if they are buildings rotting in the skyline or massive stacks of papers, or calcified heaps of bones.

We have been shunted out of the universe. We're trapped. Cast aside like empty rail cars into a world that is coming to an end, consumed by the Destroyer. We have to find our way back into the network of the world-lines, take the index, and rebuild this world. We've been digging through the lines of possibilities, of histories, of worlds, by indexing every instance of every interaction, to find the source from which we can travel to other world-lines. It's a maze and we're almost out of it, almost out of this limbo. But Nisha doesn't know I am disintegrating too.

I'm afraid to look at the moon. If my hunch is correct, we are close to the end of this world. I lean on the balcony to see if the moon is up.

A structure collapses somewhere far off. A moment later wind rushes past. A roil of papers churns in the street, the sound a hypnotic song. Papers lift from the broken floor facing us. They flutter and waft, adding to the song.

In the sector of the sky between the two buildings, the moon arrives. It stays suspended, all lit up, like it's onstage. It's got no lines to say. No song to sing either. It's a prop, only there to shine, to behold.

I move the telescope apparatus on its slider and take a nervous gulp. Nisha removes the black cap on the top, and light pours inside. It ricochets off angled mirrors, passes through lenses, and emerges from the eyepiece.

As I look I have a sudden memory of the spinning of the world, of how the stars used to arc across the skies. I remember being giddy at the thought that we were whirling so fast in space. But now the moon does something strange: it flickers. Its terminator shifts into a deep crescent.

I shrink from the eyepiece and look up. How many days have we been on this balcony? Did they pass without sunrise? Have I lost time, or is the world whirling into a death spiral? I feel nauseated while the moon shows its deathly grin. There is a Destroyer in the heavens, and we are all in its maw.

Nisha squeezes my hand. I look at the moon again, and take the event apart. I index space-time components. In the regolith, I see the last footprint of man. As I record the data, a meteorite hits and the print is erased.

No! It's the Destroyer again. Erasing everything, erasing this world—pixel by pixel, byte by byte, instance by instance. We are the last words on a burning paper and the flames are closing in. My heart pounds.

“There!” Nisha shouts. She points. A dying man has appeared on the pavement, as if he has fallen onto the street below. An instant later we find ourselves standing beside him. My mouth is dry. Will the interconnected possibilities of his life open the final branch of our tunnel?

“Index him!” I say. Nisha has already entered his body. She is already in the past, scanning his whole life. The whole reel of what he did, everything he could have done, who he loved. Nisha lives it all in the dying man's last instants, cataloguing every instance of his life. Correlating events, seeking pathways from his life's possibilities out of the maze.

I look back at the dying man. His shirt and pants are tattered; he's missing one sandal. His hands are rough; his face is like a ripe leaf of an old banyan tree. His leg bears a scar. Nisha will record how the salty blood feels on his cracked lips, its warmth as it oozes through his nose and ears. The man starts to wheeze as recognition dawns on his face. He knows me. They all do.

I wonder if he can tell me anything about me. I kneel down beside him.

“Can you tell me who I am?” I ask.

He parts his lips. I lean closer. I smell his sweat, his phlegm. I smell piss and shit. In his eyes I see a dying man, kneeling and looking at the Dying Man.

I pull away, stunned. My memories return—I've looked at dying babies, children, and women…. In their eyes I see what I see, not what they see.