The Inner City (16 page)

She stayed inside for two days. She was used to being inside, but there was something in her heart, in her mind, somewhere, that wanted her to go outside. To see. Just to check. Something.

Finally she suited up, quite slowly, took the laser guns, and let herself out. She turned around carefully, surveying the area before moving to the blast site. The hole the explosion had made was deeper than she’d thought it would be. There was a glittering along the walls. Metallic ash? She surveyed it warily, some ten yards away. Most of the debris would be plastics, with some metal. There shouldn’t be much dust. She moved closer, squinting through the window of her helmet. She was afraid there would be blood, but she couldn’t see any blood.

She spun around. For a moment she’d felt that someone was watching her. But there was no one. Of course there was no one.

She was close now, standing at the edge of the blackest part, just looking slowly around, along the ground, checking the bits and pieces of things. She glanced quickly, not knowing what there was she could be afraid of.

A movement. She scanned along the outside wall of the dome. Something, yes, something small. A piece that had stuck to the wall was now, slowly, falling down.

And another. Yes, very small. That’s why it was so hard to see, there were drops of things moving down the wall. Her heart lurched but she thought she had to verify it, she would imagine things if she didn’t.

She walked up to the wall and bent over slightly, peering at it.

A piece of flesh down at the bottom of the wall, on the ground. How had it survived? She stared at it. Something else slid down the wall. So small, like a drop, and while she watched it fell at the edge of the skin and joined it.

She straightened up suddenly. That glittering—the wall seemed to have a sheen; it wavered a little. She told herself to stop thinking, to stop anticipating. She forced her body to still itself, she made herself stare, unblinking, at the steady, slow accretion of the sheen, so that the thin wet slick of it gathered, getting thicker, until it pooled to a heavy drop. There were drops here and there, small ones that gathered weight from another small one nearby, others that never moved and seemed to be waiting.

Some of them shivered, impatiently. They hovered against the wall until the weight shifted them down to a drop below them, or slightly to the side.

As she watched, she could see the largest one fall down minutely, shifting to the left, heading for the skin on the ground. Then it joined it. Of course it was still small, it was skin, yes, but just a bit of skin.

Sibbets leaned over it. She bent closer. Another drop found it and it moved, just a little. The tip of a finger. She waited again, without moving, until the silvery, sheeny stuff—thick water, she knew it—formed another drop, and reached it. She could see where the top sliver of the fingernail was just starting to be visible. It was being built in front of her.

Sibbets sucked in the air inside her helmet. Was there no relief from this kind of horror? They would assemble themselves every day, bit by bit, until she would wake one morning and find a balloon-face pressed against the plexi-window, or all four of them, touching at the shoulder, just standing together and pointing at her. It was unbearable—the thought that they would be there again,
knowing what she’d done
—she could feel her eyes rolling back in her head. She could hear herself whimper.

And the scratchings would begin again. Her shoulders tightened. She would be inside, listening to them claw their way to her, grinning, nodding, blending, aiming themselves at her. She could see, indeed, that they had turned into a joint organism; organism, yes, not people, and she should dispel any lingering trace of regret or guilt.

She went back to her lab for comfort. She stood and looked around, at the shelves of specimens—mostly the thick water. There were plastic jars and glass jars. They were all sizes, and there was a whole container of more jars in the clean room.

She thought her way through it, and then she assembled her materials the next day—jars, lids, pipettes, scoops, tweezers—and put on her suit. She carried the things carefully to the ruined dome. The wall still glistened faintly, but on the ground there were small staggered movements as globules combined. She took her first plastic cup and ticked her eyes along the ground, evaluating. That finger she had seen the day before was now assembled to the tip of the cuticle. But there was a piece of the top of the head complete with hair, far to the right. Next to that a bone with a scrap of sinew. A piece of beige skin inched towards it. She began to index, in her head, any recognizable thing. An elbow, a rib, a foot nearly complete and flexing hopefully. She bent over, watching. The things moved; they had purpose. “Probably dying to get together again,” she thought, and smiled. She could stop that.

She opened jars and took the larger parts, and the moveable parts—she would have none of them wandering away, gathering behind a rock or in the sea, repairing.

Every other day she went out, gathering with her jars and vats, picking out the hearts, the tongues, the scar on Jenks’ thigh, two tattoos (was that Squirrel or Darcy?).

The hearts and lungs and guts could wait; they were going nowhere. Feet and hands had to come first, but the heads—no, they would be gathered in pieces. It was too disturbing, even for her analytic bent, her Euclidean eye. It was enough that she would reassemble them in her mind, put the puzzle together, intellectually. Let it remain intellectual—let her surmise that the jar on the top shelf belonged with the jar on the bottom shelf, cheek-by-jowl, brow to chin. They were like lovers who were no good for each other and should be kept apart.

Or, at least, no good for her.

She gathered them, plucking them and sorting them. Would they only truly recognize their own or would they pollinate—making a Brute-Darcy, a Squirrel-Jenks, a Squirrel-Darcy? They had ballooned into each other; they might have the desire to form one interconnected being: eight legs, eight arms, four hearts, one mind.

One brain bloomed and she bottled it, not waiting for the brainpan to find its home. Four brains, each on a shelf. They might have achieved telepathy; she would see.

So, at the end, over the course of two weeks, she spooned them up, in segments or in parts, and jarred them. At first she kept them dry, then she thought—mercifully thought, scientifically thought; or heroically thought: they want the water.

She went down to the sea, and carved out a piece in her bucket, and brought it back, weighted with virtue. And she cut off pieces into each jar, tightening the lids—no hokum from them, delighting in the water—and sealed them tight.

In six months, in five months, in four months, in three—soon, soon, there would be a beep on her screen, the first text from home.

“How are you?” it would ask, and she would sit down, a smile on her face, her hands slightly shaking. The eyes behind her, blinking, the hearts beating, the lungs insisting on their own thick-water breathing—all of them watching, and she would type:

We are well.

Truly the most astonishing thing happened when that new employee Mindy walked into the meeting wearing Paulina’s hair.

Paulina’s hands immediately went up to her head. Bald. Maybe a little patch of stubble.

Paulina gasped, but her coworkers at the meeting smiled a bland welcome to Mindy. Couldn’t they see what had happened?

Paulina’s hands began to shake in anger. Her pencils had been disappearing, even her scotch tape. And now this!

She knew perfectly well that women without hair didn’t last long, speaking corporately. Management was hairist. Paulina had always maintained a middle-of-the-road hairdo: pretty much all one length to her earlobes, parted on the right side, with the back sort of wedge-cut. Mindy hadn’t bothered to change the part, even, and the colour and length of the bangs were exactly the same. “Good haircut, Mindy,” Ron Unterling said in his loud I’m-top-dog tones. Mindy beamed, but the edge of her eyes wickedly slid Paulina’s way.

“Well, well, well,” Ron said. “Enough about hair.”

So the meeting on the Reports went on as if nothing unusual had happened. Reports celebrated the status quo, and Paulina was a big proponent of the status quo, since it paid her a pretty good salary for very little effort. Her job consisted of making up questions and answers used to evaluate and categorize various corporate projects. She looked at what the company was doing and found a way of discussing it so that it seemed innovative and generous. She liked to look on the positive side of life, generally, and that had seemed to work so far.

But she was beginning to think things had changed, as Ron beamed upon the company. “The Report on Reports is coming up, and I thought this year we’d push our presentations to the limit. You know, liven it up, throw in a joke. Put some zip in their zippers. We’re going to make this the best review ever!” He looked around at the fawning faces. “See what you can do. Put extreme into the routines! How’s the Facilitation Report, Paulina?”

“As you can see by looking at—let me see—page 2,” she began, “the main delays in project completion or status achievement break down into: personnel indecision, end-usage misidentification . . .”

“It’s a beautiful Report,” Ron interrupted. He had never interrupted her before. “And so long.” His smile paused for a second, just enough for Paulina’s heart to throw out a mismanaged beat.

“I try to be thorough,” she said defensively (always a mistake: the zebra about to be corrected by the lion surely has just that tone).

Ron nodded and Paulina slumped slightly in relief. “All the information is here. It just needs a little jazzing up. I think Mindy could help you there. A little of her style added to your expertise would really sell it.”

Mindy smiled gaily; Paulina tried to keep her eyes from darting around the room. “I didn’t realize you wanted style,” she said plaintively.

Ron looked over to Mindy and then back to her. “I do,” he said.

Paulina had never asked a hard question because she had never wanted an unpleasant answer, but that was not the way Mindy worked at all. “Way too obvious,” Mindy said, crossing out things on the printout Paulina handed her. “You’re letting everyone off easy. Let’s have some fun with this.” She gave a little shake to her head; her hair shook with it.

“That’s a beautiful hairstyle,” Paulina said as nicely as she could. She wanted to see if Mindy would show any guilt at all.

“Why, uh, thank you.” Mindy seemed to be searching for something to say in return. “I like yours, too. It must be so easy to take care of.”

“I used to have hair like that,” Paulina continued.

“I don’t recall.”

“Exactly like that.”

“Well, I’m sure it will grow back.” Mindy smiled and turned away.

But it didn’t grow back. By the next week there was no more fuzz than there had been. She began to wear a hat. One day Mindy tapped her on the shoulder.

“Excuse me,” Mindy said, “I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but your hat is bothering people.”

“Bothering people? How?”

“Well, they
stare
at it,” Mindy said. “They’re trying to figure it out. You know:
why
is she wearing a hat? Is she covering something up? Didn’t you notice how many times Jim said ‘cap’ at this morning’s meeting? It’s very distracting.”

“There was a meeting this morning? I wasn’t even there.”

“See? That’s how bad it is.” Mindy was quietly triumphant in a sympathetic kind of way. She had one of those deliberately soft voices that are supposed to be nonthreatening, legally.

And Mindy handed her a memo Ron had signed that specifically requested no hats unless for religious or medical reasons. “Well, I suppose that’s not a
medicinal
hat?” she asked with raised eyebrows. “Although it looks like it might be. . . .”

One fundamental problem was that Mindy’s mind was sharper than Paulina’s. Sharp, Paulina thought, as in: sees things clearly; as in: cuts without conscience.

Mindy removed most of Paulina’s questions and added this: Do you blame your boss for the delay or incompletion?

It was a jarring yes-no question and it was bound to get someone in trouble, maybe even cost some jobs. Mindy was revising the Report in such a way that it would be necessary to actually recommend some action. Paulina had expected to retire in thirty years or so, and she could only last thirty more years by keeping herself neutral and pleasant, but she was beginning to find her nerves snapping, her teeth grating, her head filling with explosive scenarios.

And there was something in the alert way everyone was looking lately that manifestly signalled the scent of blood. Change was coming, and change was not good.

Without hair, Paulina felt conspicuous. If people stared, she believed she looked monstrous. And if they didn’t look she was left in doubt: was she now somehow unnoticeable? Had she been dismissed from the world? She was thrown off her track; she was losing her way.

The next week Paulina appeared in a wig that matched the hair she used to have. A few heads looked at her with interest. She saw Mindy glaring: the eyelids lowered; the upper lip raised. “What a nice haircut,” Mindy said in her oh-so-nice voice. “It looks somehow familiar.”

Paulina smiled at her vaguely. “Does it?” Someone down the table snickered.

Ron settled forward in his chair, his hands almost gripping the table. “We’ve got a new twist on the Reports this year; we’ve hired a Talent consultant for the presentations leading up to the Report on the Reports,” he said. “I’ve got an emcee to introduce each presentation of each individual Report, and to break it up, a magician in the middle, with a disappearing tiger. This year we’ll also have a choice of four entrées, all of them quite tasty. No mistakes like last year’s incident of the live goat.” He looked around benevolently. “We just need good, thorough Reports and a relaxed presentation. You can’t have a top-tier company without creativity, and that’s where we’re going—creative! Top tier!”

He started around the table, reviewing the area of each Report and discussing who would present it. Paulina had represented her section the year before and expected to do it again. Ron got all the way around the table before reaching Mindy and Paulina. He beamed fondly at Mindy, who put her hand up to stroke her hair modestly. Paulina lifted her own hand automatically.

“Now, Mindy,” Ron said, “tell us what you have in mind. You’ll be in charge of the section on questionnaires and appraisals.”

At that, Paulina’s hand dropped slowly, chastened. Mindy was now above her! When had the re-org happened, or was it still secret?

First the hair, then her rank. Paulina felt that she was all alone on the savannah, with something hungry moving towards her. Ron had said to rev it up, and she would do that. And she would take him by surprise to boot.

She went to everyone she’d interviewed before, going backwards through the questionnaires. She’d always filed the responses anonymously, of course, except for the letter coding in the top right hand of the first page, which indicated which department was involved and the initials of the employee.

“Have I ever stolen anything is one of the questions now,” Mort on the third floor said, holding the latest version of the questionnaire in his hand. “Have
they
? Don’t they steal my spirit while paying for my mind? What kind of questions are these? Number 91 asks if I’ve ever had sex in the office.
That’s
the only interesting question, and even that’s none of their business. But I’d like to know about the others, of course, the ones without offices. Are they using mine? Sometimes my chairs have been moved.”

“It’s a trick question. If you’re thinking about that, it shows you’re not working,” Paulina said. “It’s diabolical, actually, since once we ask the question we force you to think about it. I know what questions can do to people. They’re metaphysical, aren’t they? I never realized it before, how much I like questions. They’re the building blocks of reason!” She grinned somewhat foolishly, but she felt strangely moved. “I love my job,” she said. “I never knew it before. I love making questions.”

Mort looked at her sympathetically. “Just when they’ve started taking your questions away, too; that’s what they call irony, isn’t it?”

Paulina offered to present a small report on the residue of Reports; i.e., does anyone remember last year’s Reports? It tickled Ron, since she could go through his predecessors’ Reports and mock them.

“You can have ten minutes tops,” he said, “or the sherbet will melt.”

Paulina was guaranteed a position, which was now what mattered. She lied about how she was going to do the Report; she had something else up her sleeve. Always before, she had made up questions that everyone knew how to answer; what were the questions everyone knew how to ask?

In the meantime, she wore her wig slightly askew. It made Mindy self-conscious. Paulina began to dress better, too; she wouldn’t go so far as to say she was mimicking Mindy; she was buying clothes that were like Mindy’s, however, and she wore garments similar to Mindy’s the day after her rival did. She was working up to wearing them the day before.

She asked Mort: “What are the questions that really matter to you?”

“My top ten are: Is there a terrible disease beginning in me, how long will I live, is my wife faithful, are my kids good, do people respect me, why am I not happier, where is the money I deserve? If that’s not ten, it doesn’t matter,” he said.

Paulina wrote down them down and went to the departments and people she had interviewed before. “When will I be happy?” they asked, “And am I dying?”

They did their projects even in the middle of these questions. “Can my father hear me in his coma?” one asked. “How much pain can my daughter stand? Why am I afraid? Is there God, is there God, is there God?”

Paulina wrote the questions down frantically and began to organize them so they changed subtly but progressively from “When will I be happy?” to “Where is my true home in all this?” to “Why am I afraid?”

Through it all, of course, she wore her wig, unable to regain her hair by any natural means. Mindy certainly wouldn’t be shamed into giving the hair back, so what was Paulina to do?

The Report on Reports loomed large, as did all the questions associated with it, which Paulina now considered in all their serious political consequences. Historically the Reports had been used to eliminate people, to repress people—certainly in that regard all the janitorial and support staff were consistently repressed by the sheer fact that no questionnaire was ever directed their way.

So she asked the building super and the janitors and cleaning women. She spoke to the secretaries and the temps and the phone-system administrators. Their questions were the same as Mort’s, only with a few more about money. Paulina was excited by the pathos of their wonder, by the exactness of their needs.

“I don’t agree with some of your questions,” she told Mindy. Mindy, after all, was still doing Paulina’s section of the Reports, gathering the responses to the latest questionnaire.

Mindy shrugged. “You don’t have to,” she said easily. “We’re trying something different. You’ll understand eventually.” At that she grinned a full, white-tooth grin, the pose of a benevolent predator. Paulina could feel the lion’s eye sweep towards her; she felt in danger of being culled. The herd never actually
sees
the one who gets eaten, she thought; they look away from the kill. She wanted to force them to look, all of them.

Paulina knew what she wanted to do. “We’re going to sing our Report,” she told Mort and Joe, a super, and Yvonne, a cleaning woman. “We’re going to change their hearts with the power of our questions.”

“There are some Voices on the staff,” Yvonne agreed. “I hear them late at night, emptying the pails.”

“Henry has a voice like a boom box,” Joe added. “And the moves, he moves like a wave. He should be out in front.”

“We will
all
be in front,” Paulina declared, “in our own individual ways. We need to show how strong we are.” Her wig felt like it was slipping; she righted it. Yvonne and Mort modestly averted their eyes, and it made Paulina waver. She might be endangering them. “On the other hand, it might be risky. Maybe we shouldn’t do it,” she said softly.

“I’ve never been in a Report,” Yvonne said. “And I’ve been cleaning these offices for twenty years.”

Joe nodded “We want to do it. This is our one chance.”

The Reports took all afternoon. The minor Reports came first, like warm-up bands; they weren’t expected to grab attention. Ron glowed with achievement; he was obviously being groomed for promotion and it looked like Mindy would replace Ron when he left. All Paulina’s hopes of anonymous longevity were squashed.

Mindy wore an iridescent pearl-coloured body stocking with a long pearl-coloured skirt with tremendous slits. She threw out numbers as if she’d made them up. “Fine fractals advanced to 78 by knocking out the middle,” she said and did a split, her arms thrown upwards. “Move the work downwards and pack them in together.”

The crowd roared at Mindy’s dance; the bosses nudged each other. Mindy humbly bowed with arms crossed over her breasts. Her eyes held grateful tears.