These Lifeless Things Read online

  Does he remember? The bomb hit as I was buying tomatoes from the marketplace, and sat hissing and spinning in the dirt. Another dud, I thought, but I still leapt to pull the tomato girl out of the way, knocking over the plastic tub; we both looked like we were covered in blood.

  But it didn’t go off, and I wandered away eventually from the football-sized thing and sat on a bench to eat. The trees had just begun to turn, and their tentacles craned to stare at me, the leaves wide-eyed, curious. I used to hate that, seeing eyes on the trees. Funny what you can get used to.

  Then there he was, approaching me out of nowhere, a ragged skinny thing like a feral cat, slipping between the shadows of the watchful trunks. He was so very catlike back then, as if he might get a pat or a scrap by offering himself to a stranger, but still ready to run. He seems more settled now. I gave him a tomato, and the tiny paper packet of salt, and looked at him in the hazy sunlight, that Baltic olive skin and curly dark hair all cluttered with gold from the sun. The days, I thought, when we could rebuild. I did not know how wrong I was then.

  But he’s still here. And I’m still here.

  Instead of fobbing him off as a thief or murderer I gave him my three-quarter profile, like a bullfighter, and held out my hand. In the distance at last, as we shook, a muffled explosion.

  We were not imaginative enough, that was our problem, we pointed at the past and said, That cannot happen again, and we bought the science fiction books and said, That will never happen, and then everything happened and we were shocked, utterly unprepared, the news told us in the first five minutes ten million people killed themselves.

  But they must have been fundamentalists, we said. Evangelicals, radicals.

  No: it was everyone, we simply did not imagine it.

  After the world ended I thought we would resemble the dusty movies of the eighties, you know, studs, spikes, leather. Instead we all look like extras from Fiddler on the Roof, our clothes worn-down, exhaustively beaten up at the riverside, mangled and hung in the sun. M.’s old leather coat, bought aspirationally, non-ironically, long after those movies came out, protected me from the fires the night They came, and I had to throw it out. O noble cattle, that saved my skin!

  I haven’t seen a cow in over two years. But I know they are still out there, somewhere outside the wall. If I ever see one again, I will thank it.

  Or, well. Let’s be realistic. Eat it, and then thank it.

  We thought the world would burn, disintegrate. Instead it simply flopped over and sighed, like a sick dog, and died in the street, and the buildings sagged instead of collapsing, and no one can drive cars now, and the gangs of feral cannibal children smugly sporting the wristwatches and sunglasses of the dead never materialized.

  And yet. And yet.

  Trapped and freezing, we did eat our dead that winter, swiftly, sensibly, as if in our genes, long inured to famine, some memory had resurfaced to tell us that history was happening again. I remember sitting next to V. when it really got bad, watching him quietly forking chunks of flesh off his plate in the shadow of those eroded, tottering skyscrapers, all pocked and ropy with mould, and the old woman at my side nudging me, telling me we must save our canned goods, eat the fresh stuff first. She is probably still alive somewhere in the city. The old women of our country are impossible to kill by normal means.

  I told myself: I won’t, I won’t do it. Definitely not if it’s... if it looks like... But it didn’t, and I did. I thought it would taste like pork, but those first few bites tasted like freedom. A little bitter. Maybe we cooked it too rare.

  Some of those old women were old enough to have survived the famine, I thought at the time.

  I said to V., It’s lurking there in the genes. Something for survival. Something that lets you do what’s needed to outlast.

  He said, patiently, Genetics doesn’t work like that.

  I said, It does too. I read an article about it. In Scientific American. There’s something... they pass it on, they do. If your parents starve, their bodies remember, and then the genes of the children are ready, they are already ready for them to starve, from the moment they’re conceived.

  No, I don’t believe so, he said, but he sounded uncertain.

  That night, eating over the fire, I referred to Them as our conquerors, and Valentin hissed, Don’t say that!

  Eventually, we took back all the names that we came up with anyway. Now, everyone just says Them. And we all know. And though I have no way of knowing what the rest of the world is doing I am sure that in every language the people just say: Them.

  V. still had war eye, back then. The bombs fell constantly, the population of the city halved overnight, then halved again, then again; we railed at whoever had mustered up a plane and some munitions trying to kill Them, who failed and were killing us instead, while the statues writhed and came alive, while They Themselves flickered in and out of existence from strange angles and passed through bodies like a killing mist, while the air was filled with dust and smoke.

  Oh, that feverish burn! We all had it. They occupied our land, and then They occupied our eyes, after the skies split and the ground split and They roared up, half-seen, a blur, a glitch in the air, hints of eyeballs, tentacles, hair, scales, claws and teeth. So many of us had that look that we thought you could get some kind of disease from simply having seen Them. We didn’t know it was just the shock and the exhaustion and the dust. The oldsters knew. Saw it before. Taught us to bathe our eyes in eggcups and build fires so the smoke rose up instead of out.

  War eye. And I wouldn’t even have known the term if not for those old ladies.

  I KNOW I’M asking questions I’ll never be able to answer, though I should research for a thousand years, visit a million of these cities. (I guess that’s the point of academia, God help me.) But look at the questions my writer is asking now that we are here together. Their words and my words.

  The Invasion. Witnessed, disbelieved at first, then a part of life. The writer is wrong, though—it was everywhere. Simultaneous and worldwide, as far as we can tell. The only difference was with cities like this, where some were barricaded to trap the residents there. And now I see the writer says ‘siege’ rather than blockade. That’s rather good. In my notes I think I’ll start calling it a siege city rather than blockade city. After all, that’s what it was.

  The war that created their siege began so easily: the movements of the Invaders reliably disrupted and then destroyed anything electromagnetic, so it would have been difficult, except on a very small, local scale, to tell what was happening; people would have had to sneak in and out of the city, and as the Setback continued, that would have grown progressively difficult.

  Don’t get attached, I tell myself, but...

  No one was coming for you, my brave writer. I am so sorry. No one was coming, ever.

  There: two years. That accurately dates it to the year. And one year before the end of the Setback.

  The repeated mention of the statues. The others won’t believe me. No one’s got any proof that these... these new things, these statues that began springing up, ever did anything except remind the conquered peoples that they had indeed been conquered, just as had been happening throughout history. Vain, vain conquerors, everywhere you went. Their faces slapped onto generic bodies, welded onto generic horses.

  The fact that they all had certain similarities, though not resembling anything Earthly, helped with that theory. After all, if you invade someplace, you want some consistency in your monuments. But there is indeed mention of it. Again and again. The statues move. They come alive at night.

  Based on the drone photos, we chose a flat, intact square to drop our research pod, which turned out to be about fifty yards from one of those statues. A small one, slightly taller than me if you took it off its plinth. Ugly, blank-eyed, verdigrised the same colour as the leaves. I’ve taken a hundred photos of it since we arrived. Tell me your secrets, I demand of it. Tell me.

  Of course, what I really mean
is: Don’t tell me. Don’t move.

  The writer and the companion note the weather. It occurs to me that they would have no way of knowing that the dropped nukes did in fact change the climate temporarily. Not the nuclear winter their ancestors feared but the Long Spring that halved the numbers of the surviving Setbackers, already so minimal from the pre-Setback days. When ninety-nine percent of the population is dead or missing, ninety-nine point five percent might tip a species into extinction.

  The Five, my writer would not have known about those. No TV, no phones, no internet, no radio. Electricity seemed to run (from our best estimates) anywhere from fifteen minutes to twenty-eight hours after the Invasion, but the Five didn’t begin to fall until after that. They definitely had no idea that Taurus Gray fell practically in their backyard. I’ve seen no mention so far of fallout, radiation sickness, anything like that. They just wonder, idly, about the local weather.

  And it turned out you couldn’t nuke Them anyway.

  That polite, academic fight with Darian back at campus, in Dr. Aaron’s office. “Well where did They come from? Why can’t I say extradimensional? They didn’t come from space. We would have seen it. They weren’t from Earth. Everything had been mapped at that point. They came from somewhere else, and They’d been here before, and They resented that They ever had to leave. That’s our best theory, goddammit.”

  “When you say it like that, you make it sound like magic. Maybe you should quit reading fantasy novels for five minutes!”

  He doesn’t hate me. I don’t think it’s that. He doesn’t even, I think, hate girls in general. But he didn’t want me to come on this research trip, and even after I told him I’d applied I think he thought I’d never get funding.

  The others are his kind of scientist. Numbers, tables. Winnie with her bone shards, and Victor the dedicated biologist. People who would publish papers that he’d actually read. Darian’s never made it a secret that he thinks the only good that could ever come out of my research is publishing a ton of pop-sci books written in ‘layman’s language,’ which he hates so much, and the only good would be me funding my own research and not tagging along with the ‘real’ scientists. He won’t say it to my face. But I’ve heard enough.

  Still. There’s more than one way of knowing. I’ll never convince them of it, but it’s true.

  May 18

  I don’t know why but it struck me as funny that V. came over this morning with a lead pipe. Maybe I haven’t been sleeping enough, but I had to sit down on the steps and laugh. He stood there indignant, leaning on it.

  Where did you get that, I finally wheezed.

  Oh, come on, he said. There are exposed pipes everywhere, Eva.

  I think I hurt his pride. Just when you think a man is different, it turns out he’s just like all the rest. But I told him I had a stitch and he helped me off the steps, and even found me a pipe of my own, plain iron. Such chivalry!

  Still, we argued as we walked, swinging our pipes. He wanted to go to the modern art gallery, I to the war museum or maybe the space memorial. We could do both, I said. There should be enough daylight.

  Why bother? he cried. We need to preserve what is beautiful and good, not what only looks backward towards a past that we will never have again.

  What, war? I shouted. You can’t be serious. The past? It isn’t even past yet. What do you think this is?

  When this is all over, they won’t call this a war, he said. A war implies that we fought back.

  What makes you think anyone will be alive to call it anything? Anyway, I don’t care, I said. And the crap in the modern art gallery can wait another day. You know They won’t target it. There isn’t enough metal in there, it’s all... carbon-fibre and crap (I confess I may have said ‘carbohydrate fibre’ in my frustration).

  I wanted him to understand that this place, our little city, has been destroyed again and again, despite being so small, so unimportant, nothing essential about us except that in the old days we were in the corridor between one big city and another, and then later that we had both the railway and the lake. In WWII they bombed us into a smear in the ground, and we rebuilt and rebuilt for years. Look at the state of our walls! We owe it to those people to protect the memory of their work. To throw it away is a slap in the face.

  On we went, bickering, in the cold, light spring rain. Grateful it wasn’t heavier (I hate how you can’t hear anything approaching in heavy rain). In the muddy streets, fresh footprints, square or round or cloven, or disquieting traces of centipede, pillbug, octopus, snake. Slippery as hell. I regret not noticing that till later.

  We darted into the museum, ignoring the smashed facade, using a side door. The glass splintered quietly under my pipe. I thought it was safety glass, I said. What if a child had run into that?

  Why would someone be so cruel as to take their child here? he sneered.

  Inside, we barricaded the broken door with chairs and desks, and trotted back and forth on the squeaky parquet floor, binding the statues with canvas and rope, padding exhibits with cotton baling and crumpled paper, till everything was unrecognizable. We took paintings and even tapestries off the wall and boxed them in the basement; out of habit, as the door swung open on the darkness, V. flicked the light switch. We both laughed. The desire for electricity does not die quickly or easily. I suppose in ten years, if either of us are still alive, we’ll still be scrabbling for a light switch in dark places. We sandbagged a few of the huge monuments that were too heavy to move.

  The museum staff made all these sandbags, V. panted. How did they ever find time?

  Who knows, I said.

  And why? Why not just leave, run?

  I don’t know, I said. You can’t abandon everything.

  Outside the barricades, things paced and snarled, suspicious; you could hear the noise over the rain. I’ve always wondered: can they smell? I know they can see; if you freeze, sometimes they’ll lose interest and move on. But what other senses have they got? What do you get, if you’re made of brass and magic, or the grab-bag of assorted junk that even the abyssal creatures cannot use?

  And why do we bother, anyway, I sometimes think; but V.’s enthusiasm drags me along behind it, as if I am a young girl walking a very big dog, instead of a fortyish woman who might be (oh, for God’s sake, just say it) falling in love with a twenty-five year-old, a bloody fool of a puppy with curly hair.

  There was no time to discuss it as we left. Daylight, at least. But we stepped outside and I nearly swallowed my tongue: surrounded by sentinels, appearing silently in the rain.

  Get them away from the museum! V. said, and I said WHAT?

  Anyway. We ran, slipping in the mud, harried at our very heels. Some of the things can’t move very well, and when they phase in and out of existence they end up wedged in walls and curbs. I panted in the cold rain, choked on it, coughed. They were watching us, of course. Listening to the things going on in there. But you never know whether they’ll attack or just wander off. Bloody things.

  We climbed to a rooftop at last, and with high ground were able to stun and perhaps kill (not sure) the two things that made it up there, and then it took forever to catch our breath. Even in the old days I couldn’t have run like that.

  You’ve got a death wish, I said to him.

  No, he said. I just wanted to... I mean, after all the work we did.

  You do, you do too. And so do I. What will become of us?

  I thought he was going to argue, but he stopped, and put a hand on my shoulder, on my new coat, and he said, I’ve got a life wish. I want to live. And from now on, I’m not going to do anything but save my own life.

  Then I’ve got one too, I said. And I’ll make the same oath.

  Good, he said.

  His burning eyes under the wet lashes. Was he crying? Handy to have it happen in the rain.

  When we got back to the flat he said, Were you a teacher or something? A professor at the university?

  I didn’t want to talk about it, but I c
ouldn’t think of anything to say, either. I stared steadily past his shoulder, at the window, and did not answer.

  At any rate, it seems that we are both cursed to live.

  June 2

  Do you remember, V. said, as we chopped wood, and stopped and gasped, and chopped, and gasped again, the revolution?

  I’m not that old, you little shit, I said.

  Not that one. Or the other one. I mean the one after... after They came. Did you see?

  Oh, yes, I said, straightening, putting a hand in my back. Chopping wood: so horrible.

  Hands still blistered, hurts to write. I’ll switch hands.

  He waited for me to keep talking, but I shrugged: Yes, I remember.

  I didn’t see all of it; it was over so quickly, and it mostly happened downtown, where I often avoided going, since you couldn’t run in the rubble.

  It was a few months after the invasion, a few months before the city army assembled itself, that odd, twilight time, a soft and falsely liminal hour in which we were equally certain either that we would survive and rebuild, and that humankind was extinct and we just didn’t know it yet. And just in that twilight, a group of people, young people, as so often happens, marched downtown, and armed themselves, and because you never know where They are, because bodies (They seem to think) are things that happen to other, lesser beings, the rebels merely built a mountain of shards and stones, and climbed it, and yelled, and waved flags, and announced their demands.

  I can’t believe it happened, I said.

  What do you mean? said V.

  I mean, how utterly stupid and naïve must you be to make demands of something that doesn’t give a shit whether you live or die... I don’t know, Valentin, what do revolutionaries do? They had no leverage, none at all. How else did they think that was going to end?

  He jutted his jaw out; I had hurt him. I wondered, fleetingly, whether he, little draft-dodger, had been part of that group, the survivors who had fled and so lived; it must be hard to be a handsome revolutionary, I thought, you know, you’re always wondering what version of you they’ll use for the stamp, what for the statue; will they sculpt you when you are old and fat and you take a bullet meant for someone else in some little skirmish? Was he out there waving a flag, scared of being martyred? I wouldn’t have been.