The Living (3 page)

…I just want to be like everyone else. I don’t have ideas above my station. I want to be like everyone else. I can’t now, so it’ll have to be later. After the Pause. Hey, you! Hey, you there, in the future! I hope you will actually exist. I hope that you will be me. I hope that I will exist. If you are my continuation, if I am you, then sorry for this stupid incode that you’ve got from me… Personally, it ruined my life, but I really hope you find a way to deal with it somehow. That I’ll deal with it somehow there in the future. In eight years’ time… Because you’re eight, aren’t you?

It’s probably cowardice. It’s running away. It’s not fair. But if you will exist, if you do exist, forgive me for what I’m about to do. Sorry if I’ve ruined your (or should I say ‘my’?) mood. Sorry if I’ve created any problems for you (ha-ha, for me!!). I want you to understand. I’m planning on killing myself – yes, yes, sorry about that, sorry once again, I shouldn’t say that, I should put it differently. I’m planning on ‘temporarily ceasing to exist’, ‘taking a pause’, but I’m no fool, I know: they all get pauses, but all I have is a ‘stop’. So if you do exist, if you will exist, then glap
4
, we’ve won, you and me, because it means that we’re like everyone else. I’m like everyone else. I am a part of the Living.

And if you’re not there, if you just don’t exist, if I am no more, if I am going to disappear, I’ll die forever, like people used to, before the birth of the Living… Well, then I’m a
mistake
of nature. A genetic malfunction. A sickness. A tumour on the body of the Living. So it’ll be better without me. More correct. Simpler. Basically, however this ends – it’ll be better than it is right now….

I always wanted to be like everyone else. But they have made me a god. They have made me a devil. They have made me a fruit fly for them to do experiments on. They have made
me very dangerous. They did not even know what they were doing.

They have forced me into a corner. They have left me
completely
alone.

Today he will come again. Ef, the man in the mask. To look for defects, to ask nasty little questions, to start digging about inside me like I’m a heap of common property.

And then I’m going to set myself on fire. Then they’ll all see how a wonder-sunshine burns!

I’m sure you want to understand. If you are me, you’ll definitely want to understand… I always really wanted to.

I’ll tell you everything I know. Because you need to know.

Because I need to know. I will need to know everything.

My mother was called Hanna. I won’t say that she’s gone because we’re not allowed to talk like that. Because, of course, she is still around. She has continued to live on… All I’ll say is – I miss her. I miss her like she’s gone – ever since she went into the Pause Zone at the Festival for Assisting Nature.

Hanna was her temporary name. Her eternal name is Mia 31, but I don’t like it, it sounds like a type of washing machine. She didn’t like it either and always introduced herself as Hanna. What name she likes to introduce herself by nowadays, I don’t know. And I don’t want to know.

She had incredibly pale skin. Pale and so clear it was almost transparent, which is rare for globaloids.

Her eyes were velvety, like the wings of a tortoiseshell butterfly.

At night she would always sing me a lullaby – you know, that old one about animals, it’s still part of the range of programs in A Living Childhood. It gets installed at, I think, about age three. You’ll probably remember it:

I was already nearly nine, but I always asked for that song. I refused to go to sleep without it. Hanna said that I shouldn’t, that big boys like me don’t need songs, big boys like me shouldn’t really live with their mothers anymore, they should live in a boarding house, and there aren’t any
lullabies
there.

‘But I live with you,’ I said.

‘You do,’ Hanna agreed.

‘So sing then.’

And she sang. She had a beautiful voice:

‘You’re not going to send me to a boarding house are you?’ I asked.

‘I’m not,’ Hanna said.

‘And we’re going to be together forever?’

‘That doesn’t happen, Darling,’ Hanna said.

She didn’t call me by my name – later I realised why: it frightened her, it forced her to look into the abyss, into that
nothingness, into the white emptiness surrounded by the black circle… She didn’t call me Zero. She just called me Darling.

‘Why?’ I snivelled. ‘Why can’t we be together forever? We’re immortal, aren’t we? Let’s just agree: when one of us di…’

‘Darling!’

‘I meant to say, when one of us temporarily ceases to exist, then the other one will just look for them, and everything’ll be like it was before.’

‘It doesn’t work like that, Darling,’ Hanna shook her head.

It doesn’t work like that. She turned out to be right. I didn’t believe she was right until Ef agreed to take me to see her. Turns out I had no need for the fat little girl that she had changed into. And she had absolutely no need for me either.

No one needs anyone, pal. You don’t mind me calling you ‘pal’? I hope you don’t think it’s over-familiar? At the end of the day I’m talking to myself. Or maybe I’m not talking to anyone at all…

‘Tell me you love me,’ I asked Hanna.

‘There’s no point, Darling.’ She suddenly went tense all over.

‘Why?’

‘I’ve already told you. The Living is full of love and every part of him loves every other part equally.’

‘So does that mean you love me?’

And she said:

‘Yes.’

And then she added so quietly I could barely hear her:

‘I love you as much as I love any other part of the Living.’

‘You love me as much… as much as you love crazy Matthew who goes down the street shouting?’

She didn’t say anything. I got angry.

‘Tell me you love me more than anyone!’

She didn’t say anything.

‘So sing then.’

And she sang:

On the day when I saw her for the last time, on the day when Hanna went to her last Festival, she said that I should go to bed on my own. She said that she’d be back too late. And so she’d sing me the song earlier.

‘No death!’ she said as she left.

‘No death!’ I replied.

‘I love you,’ she said. ‘I love you more than anyone.’

She was thirty-four.

For a whole year more she had the right to visit the Reproduction Zone at the Festival for Assisting Nature. The reproductive period officially ends at thirty-five.

It would have been another eleven years before she would start receiving messages from the local Centre for Population Control with the gentle suggestion that she visit the Pause Zone. Messages like that start coming at forty-five.

It would have been another sixteen years before she would start receiving messages from the local Centre for Population
Control with the strict recommendation that she visit the Pause Zone. Messages like that start coming at fifty.

She could have lived for another twenty-six years until a Compulsory Pause. This measure applies to those who are over sixty and do not want to comply with the suggestions voluntarily.

For a whole year more she had the right to visit the
Reproduction
Zone at the Festival for Assisting Nature.

But she went to the Pause Zone.

She did it because of me. Because they hadn’t taken me into the boarding house and had left me with her. Because she had sung me songs. Because she loved me more than anyone.

Nothing extravagant, that’s what he had thought. An SPO officer’s living quarters should be strictly functional.

‘Strictly functional,’ that’s what he had said to the decorator, ‘Stylish minimalism.’ He did it all up in
socio
tones: walls à la inviz and safety furniture in the colours ‘available’ and ‘busy’. There wasn’t a lot of furniture, Ef had insisted on that, just what was absolutely necessary. The only extravagance was in the bathroom – an expansive terrarium for his Pet. But his bedroom was pretty much empty – just a soft aquasleep floor-covering with maximum surface tension. Ef had preferred maximum for a long time now, because, maybe other people don’t like it, but personally he was not a fan of waking up with the feeling that he was stuck up to the waist in his own floor. Not to mention the fact that sleeping on something flat is better for the spine…

…He sits on the floor, pulls off his mirror mask, realises that he still needs to get up, go and wash in cold water, change the bandages on his hands which had got soaked in the downpour and feed his Pet – but a dream still shackles his arms and legs. It’s not even a dream, but the sort of germ of a dream. He’s dreaming of a river. Or something that was a river once, or is going to become one…

…Animals appear at the river, or maybe they’re plants – something alive, but not yet fully formed, he tries to give them all shape…

He thinks: his dream should be like a garden where he can grow miraculous herbs…

He thinks: his dream should be like mud and sand which he can make into a castle…

He thinks: someone is watching him. But at that moment he lets the thought go and it floats off downstream…

He thinks: he doesn’t have much time and the river is flowing fast…

He thinks about the weed in the river…

It was like the river, his thoughts, and the weeds, were all clumped together and chucked away. As if a tablecloth had
been yanked away, and beneath it there is a mushy termite mound. Hundreds of little oval cells, a porous writhing mass. Ef is inside it. Inside one of the cells.

It clings tightly to him, like a cocoon; Ef twists and turns, instinctively trying to tear through it.

The walls of the box respond to his movements, obedient and moist. They don’t break – they stretch. They give way, freeing up space for him. Now he is inside a ball.

Ef gets up and goes over the soft floor to the bathroom. Seeing him, the mantis stands on its hind legs and scrapes the wall of the terrarium with his front legs… Ef taps his fingers on the glass – the mantis folds his hands together solemnly, as if praying, begging for food. One leg is bent, broken…

Wash. Wash and drink, drink, drink cold water… He rinses his face and takes a few greedy gulps, but it doesn’t get any better. The water seems warm, horribly warm, imperceptible. Ef lifts his head and looks at himself in the mirror: murky drops run down his mirrored mask, which is reflected in the mirror, reflected in the mask, reflected in the mirror…
What the hell? Did I not take my mask off?

He reaches for the soft edge under his chin: the mask doesn’t give. Like it’s stuck to this skin. He pulls at it again.

He pulls with all his might.

The front door turns out to be locked from the outside. He shoves it with his shoulder.