9. Stone Throwers
A/N: Seven months ago I began this chapter, and seven months later I've managed to struggle through it in spite of emotional turmoil, a newfound recklessness, an overwhelming preference for poetry over prose and (this being the usual excuse) a ridiculously tight junior college schedule. If anyone notices the feel of the plot or the characterizations being rather dislocated and shaky, that's me to blame, since my old style of writing has given way to something slightly less secure but much more descriptive and metaphorical. I'm trying to revive the music; I think they're what gives the story its edge.
I'm attempting to steer clear of the despair environment that I've done much in the last few chapters and shift into something else (I don't know what). Whether the environment and story have been adept at translating futility and misery is up to you to decide. I'll be ending off soon; I don't want this too long. But it's going to take some more time though.
"Are you alright?"
"I wish you would stop asking me that."
The rest of the journey we undertake in silence. From the point I meet Iain and Vanessa at the dining area of the haven, up until the deathly peaks of Zechaat skyscrapers shadow themselves with distance from the back of our craft, no single word is exchanged. An understanding, deeper than the loss of fellow human lives we will never know, is the only thing we share on our endless path home.
Even the measly breakfast the haven provided – of crust and a bitter honey flavouring – we consumed without conversation. I had made attempts to lighten the mood with something to say, but somehow I am always interrupted – or silenced. Iain and Vanessa had met my eye later, during our final inspection of our cargo we were to bring back to Zyjushem. Clearing room for the three of us amongst the boxes upon boxes of purchased items, I remember realising my guitar had been stowed away in the cargo hold of our craft. I had completely forgotten it; now looking at it again seemed as if I had been reunited with a long lost friend.
There had been scavengers on the street as we exited Zechaat.
Our departure was almost ghostly. Mr. Niel, hesitant of remnants of yesterday's mob, steered clear of the main roads. His reason was that of safety more than anything else; although I suspect there was something else he could not commit himself to see. But we saw it anyway. Down by the crowded boulevard, along the street where we were so earnestly welcomed by traders on our first day. With his arms across him and face hidden by the flailing blue and white awning from some unknown stall, we picked out a man lying on his side. Only his torso appeared visible, I recall, the rest of him erased by the ground by which we was sprawled upon. I remember gazing upon this scene without sentiment, without any stirring of thought from deep inside of me. I watched from the window as passing pedestrians overlooked it, their eyes not noticing – or unable to notice – the dead man's dump.
Like the way everyone had overlooked Earth fifteen years ago.
I find my place in the cargo hold directly above the steady whirring of the inner engine of the craft, adjacent to the only window in the compartment. Vanessa has her eyes cut short of opening, and thinned into closing. Iain is gazing out of the window from his place at the door.
We see nothing but wide, greyed landscapes, drowned by the recent onslaught of rainy weather. Smudgy, hunched shadows accompany us in our return; the generous, tarried highways of the Zechaat vicinity soon dwindle into lone, quiet mudtracks, which turn into asphalt again as a town approaches. A limitless horizon of muddy plain and sombre sunlight borders the stretch of road back to Zyjushem, like a single vein into, and out of, the Solbrecht interior.
The hours ebb into mornings and evenings. Mr. Niel avoids the inns now; he has spoken to Father, voicing his fears and whispering without pause. I can tell. The violence has extended even to the drab countryside. The stripped forests that we saw on the road to Zechaat are smoldering totems of ash. Mud and dirt have splashed onto the road at certain intersections. The rain has cleaned almost everything, but my eyes are constantly kept awake by the puddles, everywhere. Huge pools, open against the monochrome sky, dot the mud and grime and silence.
But the surest evidence of the attacks comes when we are forced to stop at an inn.
Mr. Niel knows an human-owned inn several miles off our usual route. Toward dusk on our second day, we take another detour; skidding along the paved road in the near enclosing dark, we reach the inn. And we I shudder at the derelict building.
Several other crafts are parked there too. But some have shattered windows; others show symptoms of battle. The inn itself, like most of the lodges in the interior, is a solitary, squat dwelling. A skeletal vine runs up its side, as if to claw the entire inn as it extends across the roof. A chimney breathes frail gasps of smoke; the walls are soiled with mud and several windows are cracked down the middle. But I keep silent. A roof over my head is enough for me not to complain.
"Keep your eyes open," Father warns.
I catch sight of another pool by the wayside. It has taken over the rest of the road, which trails away into the night. I cannot help but focus on the puddle, darkened into a frightening depth and seemingly still in the dying light of a cold sun. Iain motions me on my shoulder, urgently. I tear my eyes away from it, but not quickly enough. There is a black smear against the night, floating along the banks of the pool. The more I look, the more blotches my mind pictures.
"Iris," Vanessa turns me towards her. She takes my shoulders, and her face blurs as she speaks: "Don't look… just don't look."
I nod my head drowsily, as we hurry to join the rest. They are already at the door; in the trench beside it, are soil-stained flowers, scraggly and bone-thin. As Father enters the heavy-set door, we are taken into a dark landing, stuffy from days lacking exposure. Amidst the thick gloom, I can piece together ragged tips of furniture and the rooms beyond.
The air is welcoming, though, with the warmth of a fire.
There are guests, all human; they crowd the fire in the lounge. The inn, I know later, belongs to a mother and son, to whom the battered building is their only home and artery. They are a quiet, introverted pair, whose room is lit by a spilling candle at the end of the passage. As we gather in the lounge, we learn there are no rooms left. We bargain as they serve us, almost wary, almost too accustomed to the darkness to advance towards us near the warm fireplace.
"I'm sorry, sirs," she addresses Father and Mr. Niel. She is willowy, with shreds of youth still in her eyes, her voice, but she obscures her face with a sort of veil, "the only places left are the reclining chairs in the lounge."
Mr. Niel casts a glance at Father. "That will do nicely, Ma'am," Father acknowledges.
She excludes herself from the fireside conversation, as her son gently places extra blankets, worn-thin by years of overuse, on the bare floor. He passes one to Vanessa. I dare not mutter a word, let alone an offering of thanks, for fear of the spectacle we caused with Maya at the other inn. Maya. I try to blot him out of my mind as Father speaks with the other guests – on business, on politics, on the bloodshed.
Unavoidably, they speak of the Drej.
I watch, from my bed behind an unnoticed coffee table, where a bowl of dried fruits basks in between the air of chatting. The fire burning constrained in the fireplace rasps with the breath of smoke, as the flames continuously rise and fall, licking the walls' ashen sides with each flicker. Now and then, a hiss of embers sets the lounge into a blood red illumination. I turn my face from the fire's movement, attempting to sleep as the words of conversation linger.
"Has the madness spread deeper into the interior?" Mr. Niel questions them.
The man he talks to lights a kerbala, and in addition to the ashen aroma from the glowing fireplace, the air becomes saturated with the fumes of raw, Solbrecht tobacco. His face, parts the guttering smoke like a draft blowing from an open window. The other guest, perches himself in the fraying armchair behind me; I have yet to get a full glimpse of him, but with Iain curled up closely to my right, I have no reason for anxiety.
"There have been incidents, but the authorities in the capital have yet to acknowledge them. The damage after all that chaos in Zechaat will keep them preoccupied for a while," he says, his tone deathly monotonous. "I only know of one death so far."
"How many humans, you say, died in Zechaat again?" Mr. Niel inquires.
"Reports say at least ninety: enough to make any human afraid…"
A sudden movement by the other guest interrupts the conversation. He gestures, apparently wanting to speak; when he does, his voice is determined, but strained.
"Watch out for the mobs, they are everywhere now," he tells as I try to feign sleep. "These people have been driven to fear, you must understand… and for a good reason too: the Drej have torn apart a drifter colony."
Father immediately turns upon the man: "What? How can this be possible?"
"It happened, ironically, as recent as the day the rampage began across this… dammed planet. Some details have been coming in – I worked with a broadcaster's until I decided to flee the city for my life, see – and just before I departed, the channels began filling in with accounts and descriptions of a drifter colony being attacked, by the Drej. They say it was New Marrakech, just at the outskirts of the system…"
"So the Drej are coming ever closer," Iain mutters to me.
"It could be the reason why the riots have intensified," Mr. Niel suggests.
But Father, I notice, remains aghast. Although our distant family and relations, have never lived in New Marrakech, Father has constantly reminded me that our link to the millions in the colonies must remain intact; that out of the millions, we found a planet for ourselves – as refugees. Yet he has never forgotten the poverty of the drifters. Aunt Cheng, for instance, was from one of those colonies.
"You know what I think," says the man behind me, his voice slightly raised, "these are tough times, but as humans, we're going through something we've only gone through perhaps hundred of years ago in our history. It's different now: we're getting hated collectively. I'm inclined to think this may soon be an end for us, though. If they're after us, what else can we do but wait for them to come?"
The smoking man chucks his kerbala into the fireplace; the hungry flames reduce it to embers in a few seconds. He gets to his feet, and stares almost madly around at everyone in the room.
"I'm just sick of running, that's all," he speaks, exchanging his monotone for frustration. "I don't want to own this planet; shit, I don't even want all those human-haters to hang for their malice. But I'm sick of running. First from Earth, then from my town, and eventually from nowhere…"
The last thing I see of the conversation is Father approaching the man, while the fire lurches, splutters and fades into a luminous shadow.
"Somehow or other, I suppose that's the only way we can go on living and not call ourselves hypocrites for forsaking what we are."
The innkeeper's echoing steps on the wood-boarded floor awake me the next morning. Unlike the urban morning in Zechaat, the air in the inn smells stale, instead of being smothered with exhaust and traffic's incessant moan. The morning seems more authentic, more like home than Zechaat. As the innkeeper does her rounds, she opens a boarded-up window, allowing fresh sunlight to satisfy the otherwise moody room. From outside, silence enters into silence, but I can see there will be some sun today. I remove the thinned blanket, catching the pure air of a hopefully normal morning.
At a second glance, tick welts cover my exposed arms and legs.
The morning air of this isolated inn basks placid in the responsibility of a blue sky. As we eat a modest breakfast, my stomach grumbles for a Mother-cooked meal; within the next few days we will finally reach Zyjushem. We take our leave, neither relieved nor sad to leave the lone inn. The other two guests prefer to linger a while longer; Father bids the woman and her quiet son farewell, and we leave them in the gravel lawn still dotted with puddles and morning sunshine.
Trying to recline with the thoughts tugging at my mind in the back of our craft, the journey enters attrition: a single vignette of an immobile painting flashes, inconsistently, at our faces. The interior retains its barren-ness, despite a sudden shower as we slowly climb into the environs of Zyjushem.
There are puddles everywhere, overwhelmed with mud.
Even in the narrow street outside our home, the air is thick with silence – and a severe foreboding, of something unseen, of something to come. As we step, gingerly, out from our vehicle, the doors to our home fling open, revealing the faces of Mother, Aunt Cheng, Michelle and Liwei all pasted in that single rectangle bordered by doorframe. At the sight of our disembark, they rush out, embracing us with a muttering of words and shaky arms.
"Oh, I heard…I heard," Mother says again and again.
Father embraces her, planting a chaste kiss on her cheek. "That is all history. We are all right. No one was hurt. Iris was caught in the riots, but nothing serious has happened."
Mother's eyes move to the binding of bandages and dermpatch on my arm, and in an instant, she is upon me.
"Iris, oh, Iris… are you alright? Does it hurt?" she says, as I catch sight of her tears. I cannot help but begin to cry too. There is a feeling, greater than the music, greater than the revulsion of being so close to seeing my own blood on my hands; for at last, until the next wave comes, we are safe together.
The drab weather of a non-existent Solbrecht autumn stretches into months, with an obvious invisibility of sunshine and rain. In the small street at the foot of my window, running crazily into the dwellings in our community, I watch as the wind, seemingly the only natural force alive in the world, carves hollows in the dust that otherwise gathers ignorantly in our drains. My window tilts forward from our house into the street, like an overhang; Ershed and Tamar work consistently in the bakery at the far end of our street, their labours stream down the lane in a consistent, musky odour of butter mingled with wild flour and vegetable oil.
Amid these moments, their etching scraped into my daily life as the shatter of a ruined guitar string, I pace my room, my walk still irregular from my wound. My injury has made me realise how much I dislike walking with a slight limp: as my limbs flex and muscles slacken to achieve a step, the joints unclench, and the abrasive grind of joints hardly helps in the recovery. I haven't been to school either. I heard that it had been sacked during the short period of riots that had gripped Zyjushem, its windows smashed and front façade torched.
I am unable to venture into the world that I once knew. It doesn't seem to exist anymore. Iain says it's dangerous to be out on the streets in the late afternoon and evening; since the riots, everything seems to have been absorbed into a outline of false calm, the veneer for an inside full of suppressed wrath and violence that has just begun to surface under the recent lawlessness. Iain reckons, until the weather gets better, no human should be outside alone.
It does seem strange: from my window, the world looks similar, though I know it's changed.
I cease the thoughts of the world outside my window; allowing them instead to cradle my guitar effortlessly in my hands, and as I examine the chords for a new song, silently pluck out the notes for the music. With one hand half-closed over the fraps on the guitar's neck I loosen my fingers, strumming a disheveled, sour sound – the ghost of a song, unable to be exorcized without the push of the amp.
Sometimes I wonder what it would be like if that performance that we did wasn't just for the money or the recognition. My fingers lined with fleeting red scratches stream down the guitar neck to pull an incomplete note together. Yet I have been given to this pensive mood lately: when I sung that song 'Freedom Fighter' meaning every word that was in those lyrics. Or did I? Perhaps it was a mindless grip of the moment.
Why this hasty onslaught of justifications?
Frustrated I allow my guitar to hang, unsteadily, hooked like the poor bind of a limp knot onto one of two of my now immobile fingers. Its weight forces it down, and it rams into my right knee, jarring my already weakened limb into a flinch of pain. I did not need to endure that which I did endure, I tell myself; its not comforting, but it keeps my mind away from the hideous proximity of possibilities that litter a curious mind such as this.
I brush a lock of my hair aside, seeing a silvery black stream entangle in within those same fingers that had once plucked on the guitar. I arrange the set of music notes and references on my bed; clutching my guitar once again, I narrow the wire from the amp, kneading its stretch and then fasten it to the back of my guitar. Let's try something new, shall we?
Imagining myself again before a crowd of hundreds all awash with noise and expectancy and rowdy demand. I perfect the intro; the music, more vicious to the ears than even the old images of blood and wreck, resounds off the room's walls, before it slams back into my face, vengeful at having no escape.
The sound that embraces me in echo is raw and base, a shade of the magnificence from the performance, lacking in its overprotection. The music drives me to me feet; shaky, I struggle to stand, but the instability consolidates the music, and the song of human shackles intensifies into personal lament. I jar the guitar against my arm, fingers slippery over the metal strings I once had complete dominion over. My thumb caresses the backdrop of the music, its chorus steady and repetitive with strumming. The music continues, listless but not personified…
And then, as if a second self from somewhere in me took hold of my senses, I snap into a half-dance, half-guitar playing stance. I don't know where you come from – I slash the strings with one complete arc of certainty and the edge of rasping, screaming, salient undertones shatters the restlessness of the former disquiet, and the song turns from personal lament into a dirge bordering on pathetic fallacy – can you hear me? – the bridge silences the throbbing fingers – your fingers seem to be alive with lamentation, and your soul my hollow self – at the exact moment, the hands shroud the music, gliding swiftly over the still shaking strings, sliding into its exact place – you play so much like the person I want to be, what do you desire?
To break free.
The chorus stammers into the walls and then bursts at my feet, prostrate, its hands encompassing the room with the blasting throbs of rasping and snarling utterances. Merge as one – and the two selves complete their unity, the guitar alight in my arms, cradled and moaning the lamentations of a hundred generations of music before this day and having enough to mourn for another hundred. I am at the climax, I am at the centre of it all. The music's invisible mouths speak to me their chorus, their strangled stutters: I want to heal - at the downdraft of my arm the music throws my head back into possession – I want to feel – and at its return I leap into a strenuous curl, my guitar uplifted, and arms flailed around it, dancing – what I thought was never real -
I barely notice it, but in the screaming wails of the guitar, the air has suddenly become blurred with smudges. At first I think them as spots from my own dizziness; they have a certain rhythm, and I accompany them as in a trance. Then I see them stream from outside my window, cut through the air of my room, smash into the wall and crumble into angular fragments.
Stones.
One volleys from the air beyond my window into the ceiling, crashing stunted and falls to my feet in a heap of flint and sand – I want to let go all the pain I felt so long – another rock fumbles off the walls, but more than physical pain comes the sharp injury of the taunting that ensues – erase all the pain till it's gone – and with greatest effort I silence it.
"Be gone, filthy human! Filth of the universe!"
"Trash of the country! Useless rabble!"
"Sing your chants and curses somewhere else! Where the sun don't shine!"
"Send your curses upon yourself, vermin!"
I remember the vile, hateful voices; I pick up Arhleus and Glein among the rabble of their number. A stone steaks vertically in an curve from the window and slams into my right cheek – erase all the pain till it's gone – my fingers stumble a little, and the only one note is wasted. In the shadow of the window I can vaguely sketch their outlines: erect and proud in their stature, bent and crooked inflexibly as they hurl the stones to the target girl by her window.
The hail of stones persists as the I repeat the fearsome, familiar chorus, moving away from the reach of their missiles, each one laced with a thousand curses of those who despise the way I am. And I wonder, is this what we played for in our performance back in Zechaat – a storm of applause and the accompanying threat of death and the eventual hail (of stones)?
I strum the final lines, my fingers entering the phase of their sliding silence. The stones, too, reduce their onslaught as intensely as they had begun, and I'm left with the echoes and the ringing aftermath of the song that would take all my desires, and those of everyone's, to a place of retreat. A place of hope, that is above all other hopes, where the music can flood without restraint from my hands. A place – anywhere - somewhere I belong.
Written by shelter