Turn (3 page)

“They cherish life just as much as you do.”

“Let me guess; you stuck a cricket inside your ear and it told you? Did you let it nibble on your earwax too?”

“It’s alive. If it wouldn’t want to live, it wouldn’t move. It’d be dead. It’s simple.”

Sono looked sternly at his grandpa, wearing innocence with satisfaction. The only thing that moved was his stomach, rising and falling. Edgar didn’t even blink, not for a while at least, and then suddenly he discharged a dozen blinks in a flash. Sono took his eyes off of him.

“Hey, so…what is she?”

“What she is?”

“Yeah. Turn. Because…”

Though embarked on rather flippantly, a distraction, his leaps back in time swiftly pushed aside everything else currently tiptoeing through his mind.

“It doesn’t matter what she is.”

Edgar snapped his fingers blithely.

“Aww, come on, don’t get all blue on me now…”

“I haven’t, I assure you.”

“Not even a little bit? Like turquois? You could use some color on those grim cheeks.”

“It really doesn’t matter what she is.”

“All right, it doesn’t matter…but if you know, can’t you please just tell me, and we’ll be done with it?”

“Dead and alive.”

Sono’s surprise at his grandpa’s conceding turned sour the very moment he was about to alter his expression, realizing it wasn’t any better from before. He did ultimately alter his expression, but in the opposing direction. “Awwwaah…another riddle.” Sono sighed softly. “How’s that possible…”

“Do you think you’re any different?”

Peering at his grandpa, he tried to establish whether the miscommunication had happened naturally, or if it was a ruse. His efforts quickly proved fruitless.

“I meant the riddle, but…haaw, shit. All right, you don’t want to drop it, fine. I’ll bite; hook, line, and sinker. Yeah, I do think I’m different. I’m right here, alive and speaking. I don’t feel the least dead. Or what do you say; has my soul left me? Is it fighting rabid unicorns?”

Edgar stared at him austerely, not in the eyes, or even his nose, but at his forehead.

“Why are you looking at my forehead?”

“A single breath. We’ve taken billions of them. But just one, narrow it down to one single breath; when is it born, and when does it die? Birth isn’t the beginning, and death is not the end.”

“But you just said that she’s dead. She’s both dead
and
alive.”

“Because we all are Sono. No matter what you encounter, it all follows the same loop. It’s simple. Transformation, all of it. Energy. How could one exist if the other didn’t? It’s all connected.”

“
It
being what? I never know what you’re talking about. It’s like pushing a button on you and random words just comes flying out. At least give me something to fend them off with, you know, some context. Don’t you have a filter or something to sort that shit? A decency filter, for us less shamanian?”

“No.”

Veiling his disappointment by firmly pushing his lips together, Sono gazed out over the gray plains. For a few moments, neither one said anything.

“In a way, this desolation land is perfect for you, isn’t it?”

“That wasn’t very kind of you to say, Sono.”

Annoyance assailed him immediately, stemming from Edgar pointing out his rudeness, and also realizing his own part in said rudeness, which was, in all fairness, uncalled for.

“Why do you have to fight it?” his grandpa asked him.

“I never said I want to fight anything. You did.”

Edgar scoured the ground before them, his entire face below his eyes drooping. “Fend them off, you did say that.”

“Yeah, but that’s not fighting.”

“Why do you want to fend them off?”

“Because I want to keep my sanity, the little that’s left after all the time I’ve spent with you...”

Sono flashed a manic grin and a finger-gun at Edgar.

“Are there yellow butterflies?” his grandpa asked.

“What? Are you for real?”

“Are there yellow butterflies?”

Pressing his freshly moistened lips together, Sono kept increasing the pressure instead of letting up.

“Don’t pretend you didn’t hear me Sono, that’s impolite. I’ll try once more; are there yellow butterflies?”

“This is dumb. Do I really have to answer that?”

“Just tell me what comes to your mind; it’s not any harder than that.”

“I don’t know...there’s you answer. Fondle it all you want. I’ll even give you two some time alone if you want.”

Edgar tilted his head sweetly.

“Play along. You’re too young to have lost your imagination.”

“Imagination? This sounds more like insanity to me.”

“Do you think you know the difference?”

“Yeah, I know the fucking difference. They’re separate.”

Recognizing that he might’ve overstepped, again, but this time coming to the realization all by himself, Sono peered humbly into his grandpa’s face. But he had not anticipated him to look so tired. He looked exhausted. He looked frail; he looked well beyond his years all of a sudden. Very seldom did Sono spot frailty in his grandpa.

Against his wishes, his eyes latched themselves onto the lavish folds under his grandpa’s lowered eyes, and would not let go.

“I haven’t lost my imagination; I just think this is dumb. But you’re a great shaman, Grandpa.”

Out of nowhere, Edgar slapped his thighs and then performed a very brief dance, something that looked like a startled sleepwalker’s version of line dancing, making his colorful pull tab necklace bounce and jangle. Just as abruptly as he had initiated it, he stopped it.

“Are there yellow butterflies?”

Exhaling vehemently through his nose, Sono reluctantly gave in. “Holy…
yes
, they’re everywhere. Oh, it’s beautiful,
marvelous
. I’m eating one as we speak. Mmm, njam njam, history’s delicious.”

Edgar quickly carved himself a disapproving grimace in response to Sono’s vigorous munching of saliva and gas.

“I’ll ignore that one. So, if there are yellow butterflies, then there are black butterflies as well. It’s simple Sono.”

Baring his teeth in frustration, Sono shut his eyes briefly.

“Yeah, simple…but I don’t get it. And do you know what else? I don’t care either.”

He widened his eyes and then shook his head to further substantiate his claim.

“You don’t care about her?”

One face, and one face only, swept through the underground chambers of his sealed mind.

“About Turn? How is this about her?”

With a strange tranquility, and above all, an affected smirk that bordered on mockery, Edgar seemed to silently gloat in his defeat, one Sono himself was unaware of until that very moment. Nevertheless, the feeling accompanying it was not pleasant, and he sought to end it, even if meekly.

“So why butterflies, and not, I don’t know…squirrels? And how is black the opposite of yellow?”

Sono didn’t face him, nor did he look away, pretending to be unaffected by it all.

“What did you think the opposite of yellow was?”

“Uh…” Sono tried desperately to come up with a color. “Purple.”

“Bees?”

“Bees? Bees what?”

Sono met Edgar’s gray eyes with vigilance.

“Have you ever seen them? I mean the old, original pollinators. The ones that humans were forced to replace when they died out. It was long before you and I were born. Have you?”

“What do you think? No…shit. Despite my unearthly good looks, I haven’t traveled from some magical past; I was born here, I guess partly thanks to you. Did you forget about the shriveled antenna between your legs?”

“I meant holograms Sono, videos or pictures. And there’s no need to be so hostile. Or crass for that matter.”

Sono looked away and inhaled deeply, inflating the weight that had appeared in his chest in the hopes of it taking flight. “Have you eaten? I bought some corn.”

Edgar smiled privately. “Ah…yellow.”

“I can drop it in the fire and char the shit out of it if you want to. Dead and alive, just the way you like it.”

“What did the corn ever do to you?” Edgar asked reprovingly.

“Can’t you just respond normally once in a while?”

“Like you do? There’s a lot of anger in your speech Sono, for no reason but to sap you of strength. I don’t like it…you shouldn’t either. Muse over it. Promise me.”

After a soft snort, releasing all cognitive functions of merit along with it, Sono walked into Edgar’s dim home with the corn kernels in his backpack, leaving a cloud of dust behind as he threw the cloth door aside forcefully. He slumped down beside the fireplace, an ample pit with charred bricks stacked in a circle around it, where currently two little pieces of smoldering charcoal lent some color to the predominant gloom.

As always, pots, plates, and cups were stacked beside it in a pile, and this time the perforated plastic box was filled with dead crickets. Edgar persisted on giving them air, despite being lifeless. The Core prohibited anyone from breeding their own insects, coming down hard on anyone that set up their own shop, but the Outsiders often outsmarted them. If insects could be considered a triumph…

Most of the time he didn’t mind the sentence on his arm, it was his badge of courage, one nobody could take away from him, even if he were to lose his arm, a testament of his tenacity despite the Core’s cruelty, a testament transcending this wretched life in the anemic shadow of the towering walls. It was a sign of belonging, both to the people populating the Outsides, since most had one, and inevitably to the group he had joined after his release, specializing on stealing from the Core that had labeled him a thief, and also punished him for it. It was now his business card.

And sometimes, he hated it; he had even considered removing it. Removing the memories attached to it. Scrambling the lines of text and removing the fluorescent ink, leaving him with a patch of scar tissue that would cover most of his forearm, was a fairly safe procedure compared to having the bone carvings removed, which included opening the flesh under heavy sedation, often alcohol, and then filing the bone down with a handheld file or simply scrambling the sentence with a sharp instrument. But no matter how much fury he emptied onto it, at the end of the day, it was purely a cosmetic procedure. It didn’t hurt or inhibit his lifestyle in any way, nor did it change the past, undo the sentence, or erase his record. The Core still had every possible sample of him that they could need; bodily fluids of all kinds, flesh samples, hair samples, x-rays, voice recordings and eye scans to name most of it. Or so he had heard from a number of people. Since he was sedated through it all, remembering nothing, he often wondered how anyone else could remember anything.

But why they went through the trouble of tattooing the sentences, albeit through scarring, and especially with fluorescent ink, nobody outside the Core knew. But as with the purported samples, everyone had theories. To trace them. Pure spite. Boredom. Senseless tradition. Poison. Spice or tenderizer. Parasite eggs. Spermicide.

It wasn’t like they could’ve been mistaken for an inhabitant of the Core anyway. At least not the one’s visible; prison guards, police and, on rare occasions, the squads that executed the raids. No one had ever heard of anyone who had seen a member of the Core that wasn’t of the previous three, let alone one of them without armor. With their angular shapes and reflective, lifeless exterior, they looked like they belonged on a circuit board, stationary and blinking, rather than moving about with weapons.

Most, if not all of the people that performed the procedures of removing the sentences, and there were only a handful of them, professed that it was nothing but regular tattoo ink, and they themselves often kept theirs, some even embellished them, working it into a larger piece, overthrowing its intention.

The Core saw the removals of the sentences as an especially egregious offense, forcing the people that performed them to constantly be on the move, along with their often bulky equipment. The Core’s raids, executed by a dozen cursed automatons lowered from a helicopter were targeted at either insect breeding or sentence removal. It was an imposing squad, much heftier than both the police and the guards, and often perfectly invisible at night.

There were also rumors of a special kind of Core police, targeting individual Outsiders or specific groups as a whole that they deemed dangerous, and infiltrating them. But no one had ever exposed one of them. However, the probability of there being spies among them Sono considered to be very high. It would be a bigger surprise if there weren’t any. But so far their presence had not brought along much of an upheaval. Maybe the Core simply didn’t feel threatened by the activities of the Outsiders…

Though there wasn’t one official resistance movement, there were several smaller groups in the Outsides, most of them working in symbiosis with each other. Many of the groups preferred people without sentences, often young people, to carry out their more elaborate missions. Besides the benefit of size and agility, they were unnoticeable in the dark as opposed to the majority of its members who looked like a society of enlightened Grinch’s. Some seemed to think that it was a major factor, but Sono had grave doubts. Surely the Core would have better gadgets available than having to rely on spotting a greenish glow in the dark. Perhaps it left a trail or something, invisible to the naked eye.