Strange Mammals (19 page)

She stood over Moz’s groaning form, then flipped him over and began punching him repeatedly in the balls. Moz screeched and tried to protect his groin, but she slapped his hands away and continued.

“Give me black eye, you fuck! Like to beat up women so much, ah? Fuck you, you pissoir!”

After several long moments, but not before Savita had reduced Moz to a weeping fetus, several more CNB officers stepped in the room to pull her off of him. As she stood, she gave his cullions a final kick, and I swore I could hear a popping sound.

“Enough, Savi!” said the officer closest to her, a tall Malay man. “We got him, it’s over! Enough!” I didn’t like his familiarity with her, the way he held her upper arms, nuzzling his mouth to her ear. He led her outside, as two other CNBs bent down to carry Moz away. A third stepped behind me, and there was a cutting sound, then a plastic snap, and my hands came free. The CNB lifted me under the armpits into a standing position, and I stomped the numbness out of my feet.

“Come,” he said, “let’s go.”

He escorted me out of the air-conditioned bedroom and into the living room. Tables and chairs lay in smashed ruins, the front door hanging by one hinge. Out the open window, the light blue of dawn signaled brighter times ahead. Moz was dragged, limp, groaning, outside. Savita was talking to the Malay officer in low tones, and as she reached up to touch his face, I felt my stomach drop. I’d been even more deluded than I thought.

She saw me and walked back over, her eyes glowing. “Told you it would have been a stupid plan.”

“Yeah, but now I know why.”

“Thanks for your accidental assistance, but I’m sorry it won’t help you. I’m afraid Tinhau’s laws apply to citizen and foreigner alike.”

“But what . . .” I swallowed. “What about us?”

“Take it however you like. It was real as it was happening, if that’s any comfort.”

“What’s happening to your face?”

“What?”

Her eyes blazed with light now, twin suns in the darkness of her face. Her lips rippled, parted, and a flood of tiny
ikan bilis
swam out and puddled on the floor between us. The gushing sound of a fierce river rose in my ears, and past Savita the walls were gone, were they ever really there?, a massive river of time flowing and roaring into the past and the future. Flying fish leapt and cavorted from the river, growing improbable wings and lifting up into the skies. Savita had grown wings herself, as had her Malay colleague, who also sported the head of a speckled grey cat with pale blue eyes. Everyone had wings now, even me; I wiggled my shoulders and could feel them bounce on the muscles of my back.

“You’re all . . .” I searched for the word, unable to drag it up from the depths of my mind.

Savita smiled with her wavering lips, then turned and joined hands with what must have been her real lover, and with a small hop that launched them upward, they flapped their strong fleshy wings and took flight. I couldn’t let her go, I loved her, right? You don’t just allow the kind of love we had to get away so easily. I ran after her, disregarding the “Oi!” behind me, stretched out my wings, and at the banks of that mighty chronic river I jumped, hurtling upward, the wind rushing past my ears, Savita still in sight as I accelerated, closer and closer, her hair swishing wildly about her head in a halo, so close, so close, almost in reach.

~

You lead us through endless low-ceilinged corridors, following some inscrutable pattern of piping lines or electrical trunking overhead. I can see no end to this labyrinth of greyness, but you seem to know exactly where we are headed, guided by some internal positioning system of which I am unaware. Gone completely is your feral animalistic nature, purged by your killing of the revolutionary. Now you are the apotheosis of purpose and confidence.

After the hundred thousandth corner, I tentatively reach out and touch your shoulder, and ask you to stop for a moment. I need to catch my breath. You do not startle at the contact, or fly into a frenzy, but simply turn, and say, “
Very well
.”

Hands on knees, I breathe deeply, oxygenating aching alveoli, trying to regain some semblance of myself. You lean against the wall, one booted foot crossed over the other, tapping a cryptic rhythm which echoes lightly around us, the ticking a code of your mind’s inner processes. You are no less dangerous than before; in fact, with your newly rediscovered cognizance, you may be a great deal more.

I ask if you know who I am.

“Yes. I have always known.”

Who am I?

“It is unimportant in this place. You are you. In the outside world, you completely replace all the cells in your body every seven years, meaning that you are a totally different person than the one you were seven years ago. You are now, right now, a different person than before you entered this place. Once you leave, once you alight this existence, you will be different yet again, and it will be up to you and the actions you take that will determine the you whom you will become.”

This is not the answer I was hoping for.

“It is the truth. If you did not want the truth, then you should not have asked.”

With this, you edge off of the wall and open a door next to you, one I didn’t detect before. A blazing illumination floods the grey corridor, and temporarily blinds me. Though it should by all rights roast the flesh from my bones, the light is cool, soothing, welcoming. The light feels like home.

What now?

“We are here.”

Where is here?

“The end of this life, and the beginning of the next in the everlasting cycle.”

Will I meet you again?

“Almost certainly,”
you say, a note of affection in your voice
.

I step through to another world.