- Home
- Kristine Ong Muslim
Age of Blight
Age of Blight Read online
“Who do you think of when you think of unique voices? Kelly Link, Margo Lanagan, Aimee Bender—major voices in contemporary fantasy. Add a new name—full of oddities and dark bittersweet ironies—to slide up on that shelf: Kristine Ong Muslim.”
— SF Site
The Unnamed Press
P.O. Box 411272
Los Angeles, CA 90041
Published in North America by The Unnamed Press.
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Copyright 2016 © Kristine Ong Muslim
ISBN: 978-1-939419-66-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015957350
This book is distributed by Publishers Group West
Cover art by Alessandra Hogan
Design & typesetting by Jaya Nicely
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are wholly fictional or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. Permissions inquiries may be directed to [email protected].
CONTENTS
A Note on the Places in this Book
I. ANIMALS
Leviathan
The Wire Mother
The Ghost of Laika Encounters a Satellite
II. CHILDREN
No Little Bobos
The Playground
Those Almost Perfect Hands
Jude & the Moonman
Dominic & Dominic
III. INSTEAD OF HUMAN
There’s No Relief as Wondrous as Seeing Yourself Intact
Pet
Zombie Sister
Beautiful Curse
IV. THE AGE OF BLIGHT
Day of the Builders
The Quarantine Tank
The First Ocean
History of the World
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Places in this Book
You may observe that certain places recur through the stories in this book. Such places are also visited in my other books. Know that these locations are not completely made up—they may exist or could have existed under different names somewhere on this planet and in this lifetime.
Bardenstan is a suburb. In 2115, something will happen that will put Bardenstan on the map. It will be known throughout history as the site closest to the epicenter of the fallout. Outerbridge, on the other hand, remains the only part of America where plants are still grown in soil.
At the junction of the two main highways that lead to Bardenstan and Outerbridge is a nine-story apartment building called Station Tower. The nine stories correspond to the nine circles of Hell where Virgil once guided Dante. There’s only a cursory mention of Station Tower in this book but nevertheless, it helps to know what Station Tower looks like in case you happen to visit it in real life. Last week, someone had spray-painted GOD LIVES HERE on the front-facing wall of Station Tower. The dayshift doorman, Tim Shenkel, promptly cleaned it up. I am telling you all this because it is possible you reside in a part of the world where (or live in a particular time period when) the spray-painted GOD LIVES HERE remains visible.
At the ground floor of Station Tower, there’s a time loop. Break the glass housing of the third fire extinguisher to the left hallway. You’ll find the time loop behind the fire extinguisher. It will appear to most people as a window. Our lives, as well as those of our ancestors and descendants, are elaborate mythologies that intertwine and sometimes get entangled. There’s a purpose to this life. It is even possible that some of us will find our purpose in Station Tower.
Beyond Bardenstan, Outerbridge, and their junction, there exists an island. You will recognize this island by its lighthouse. And if you stand on top of the hammer-shaped rock in that island and look toward the direction of the lighthouse, you will see a ghost. There, by the third-story window, you can make out the figure of a man in a dark-colored jacket. He appears dark haired, of slim build, about six-feet tall. You can easily estimate his height off the lighthouse window’s dimensions and approximate distance between the window frame and the floor of the lighthouse. He appears here at roughly the same time every day. Sometimes, he shows up around one p.m., sometimes around two. Then he disappears at four p.m. and returns the next afternoon. Nobody knows who he is. Nobody knows what he is, what he wants, why he stays, why he comes back. On this island, there’s also a body swept to the shore. The body belongs to a child who disappeared eleven years ago. When the child’s body is found eleven years later, it is still wearing the same clothes as the day of her disappearance and hasn’t aged one bit.
All these places are familiar, and you may have been in some of them—or all of them. And if they don’t seem familiar, it is likely you aren’t paying much attention.
I. ANIMALS
Leviathan
It was the day the ancient sea beast finally reached your shore and died there. Unable to resurrect your sole prize after trawling the ocean floor for eighteen years, you secretly wired a pair of artificial gills inside it. And how the makeshift gills hissed telltale breathing at the rate of two intakes per minute! How the cameramen captured the triumphant moment when you presented the creature long believed to have become extinct during the Silurian Period. The cameramen filmed you as you supervised the lowering of your fine catch into a temperature-regulated water tank. They cheered when you gloated, “I told you I was going to get the sucker.”
Inside your rented ship, your floundering engineers hastily cleaned up your diamond-studded drill bit free of sediments, free of whatever it was that you managed to dredge up while scouring the primeval ocean floor. They said nothing about the sea beast that followed the ship home. They said nothing about how brilliant you were to think of enticing it with a low-frequency sound generator pinging at 9Hz to conform to its assumed directional ear and to account for the sound propagation rate, which was approximately four times faster at the depth where it was supposed to reside.
It is lonely and will soon find us, you once declared with glee. It is lonely, you insisted. It will recognize its song and will follow us home. And how it did. Lured by the sound, the juggernaut—whose eyes had not yet turned opaque—honed in on the low, steady humming only its kind could hear.
Your engineers did not join you outside the ship to pose alongside the fallen sea beast. They knew you were going to make up stories to explain the creature’s swift demise—not at your hands, of course, but to a believable catastrophe. You might say it was the difference in salinity or the sudden shift from the hundreds of pounds per square inch of underwater pressure to normal atmospheric conditions.
You write up your paper about the spectacular find. You always begin your speeches before the Academy with a dramatic wave of your hand unveiling the beautifully preserved specimen of the now-extinct sea monster ensconced in its liquid-filled tank, the dissected innards conveniently kept away from sight. Like a magician doing his rounds on the carnival circuit, you intone, “Behold the beast,” and everyone almost always takes that as a cue for applause.
The Wire Mother (or Harry’s Book of Love)
1.
Our first baby had a mother whose head was just a ball of wood since the baby was a month early and we had not had time to design a more esthetic head and face. This baby had contact with the blank-faced mother for 180 days and was then placed with two cloth mothers, one motionless and one rocking, both endowed with painted, ornamented faces. To our surprise the animal would compulsively rotate both faces 180 degrees so that it viewed only a round, smooth face and never the painted, ornamented face. Furthermore, it would do this as long as the patience of the experimenter (in reorienting the faces) persisted.
– exce
rpt from the paper “The Nature of Love” by Harry F. Harlow
Imagine yourself having to choose between two mothers. There’s one like myself, once fondly called an iron maiden—a body made of wire, rows and columns of sharp teeth; coldly tells you truths you prefer not to hear; gives you food and milk and perhaps, lots and lots of material things to satisfy your need for survival and superficiality. Then there’s another mother out there—a flimsy, soft-spoken one called the cloth mother. And this mother is made of terrycloth. She gives you no sustenance but seems to hug you back the way you have always wanted to be hugged—not too tight and not too relaxed. She also maintains a characteristic flush that you associate with affection. Now, be honest. Which mother do you think is better? Better, meaning, the one you’d spend the most time with. This was the premise behind Harry’s little prank about the nature of love; and by prank I mean experiment.
The one-day-old rhesus monkeys went to their wire mothers only when they were hungry and thirsty. They spent considerably more time with their cloth mother. They nuzzled her, embraced her, told her where they hurt and where they needed scratching, and slept on her fuzzy belly. Every single one of the baby monkeys pined for the comfort of the cloth mother. As for the wire mothers like myself, well, we dangled whatever sustenance we had to keep the babies from going to the cloth mother. But they never chose us in the end, never even glanced back in our direction after we allowed them to be fed. Most of the time, it was only their backs we remembered as they tottered without hesitation to their tender cloth mothers.
As for the ones forced to stay with their respective wire mothers, they all suffered from digestive problems. Harry attributed digestive upset to a physiological manifestation of the stress of being with wire mothers.
And would you like to know what Harry found out when he elicited fear among the baby monkeys? He frightened them by introducing a loudmouthed teddy bear, which was quite harmless and made us hope he simply limited himself to stressors of the teddy-bear sort. Without the mother nearby, the baby monkeys cowered. Sometimes, they ended up paralyzed with fear or curled into a fetal ball, sucking their thumbs. If the mother was nearby, regardless of whether it was the wire type or the cloth one, the baby monkey would cling to her. And in the presence of the mother, the baby monkeys were stronger, braver. They made bold moves, such as approaching the noisy teddy bear and attacking it.
2.
No monkey has died during isolation. When initially removed from total social isolation, however, they usually go into a state of emotional shock, characterized by the autistic self-clutching and rocking.… One of six monkeys isolated for 3 months refused to eat after release and died 5 days later. The autopsy report attributed death to emotional anorexia.
– an excerpt from the paper “Total social isolation in monkeys” by H. F. Harlow, R. O. Dodsworth, and M. K. Harlow
It is in Harry’s nature to not speculate, to not deduce from available data, and to not make use of theoretical experimentation. So, he came up with his prefabricated isolation kit, the portable editions of which are now sold, along with smartphones and wearable computing devices, in stores around the world.
This was after Harry had indulged in a long, long investigation into the nature of isolation and loneliness. Constructed out of stainless steel, the isolation chamber comes in many variations. Some are customized to withhold maternal devotion. Some are intended to take away social interaction. All of them are designed to stunt emotional growth. What resulted from a Harry-appointed period of partial isolation—as in the case of a bare wire cage that enabled baby monkeys to hear, see, and smell other monkeys—were animals that stared blankly, circled their cages repetitively and obsessively, and exhibited acts of self-mutilation.
With another Ivy Leaguer, Stephen Suomi, the insatiable Harry made strides by unveiling the grand version of the isolation chamber: the vertical apparatus, which was aptly and variously nicknamed by Stephen the Pit of Despair, the Well of Despair, or the Dungeon of Despair. The cramped vertical apparatus suspends infant monkeys upside down and restricts their movement in this position for up to two years. Only their mouths can move, of course, as they eat food and drink water placed at the bottom of the pit.
What Harry wanted to achieve is articulated in the abstract for “Total Social Isolation in Monkeys,” in which it states the researchers’ intention to “not only capture and distill the essence of depression, but to invent it.”
After a year in total isolation, two monkeys refused to eat and eventually starved to death. After spending up to two years in the darkness and silence of the pit, the surviving baby monkeys emerged completely deranged: clawing and attacking and screaming at everything in sight and were beyond rehabilitation. Yes, Harry tried to undo the mental damage. But do not mistake it for a gesture of atonement. Harry was no Anne Sullivan to the monkeys’ Helen Keller! He is not that kind of person. He went through the motions of attempting to rehabilitate the crazed monkeys and forced them to mingle with the normal ones in the control group only because it was a viable area to be explored in his laboratory protocol.
Sometimes, when I lay awake at night watching the motion-regulated light fixtures strewn across the ceiling, I imagine how it must have been for Harry’s monkeys. I am shaped into what is supposed to be a cold and unfeeling contraption, but I realized a long time ago that I have limits: I cannot stomach torture. Torture, for me, has always been the resort of the weak, the inept, the ill-equipped. What torturers do not understand, they simplify by disassembling, by destroying the very essence and mystery of what they are trying to comprehend. What they covet, they steal and tinker with until it bores them or they discover that the tampered thing cannot be put back together again. And what they cannot subjugate, they maim—for no other reason but because they can.
What it must have been like being suspended upside down, being trapped and unable to move for years? I asked Harry one time about the pointlessness of his Pit-of-Despair exercise when he came for one of his rare visits to my room.
He said, “I’m sure it wasn’t very comfortable.”
Then I explained that he did not really have to torture the baby monkeys, that he could have just as easily predicted they won’t come out all right. All sentient creatures would not come out all right in those circumstances. It was a moot point. “So, why do you keep doing it?” I could not help but ask.
And he said with the air of the unflappable, “Because I can.”
I have not seen Harry since, and I can’t say I’m surprised.
3.
[Harry Harlow] “kept this going to the point where it was clear to many people that the work was really violating ordinary sensibilities, that anybody with respect for life or people would find this offensive. It’s as if he sat down and said, ‘I’m only going to be around another ten years. What I’d like to do, then, is leave a great big mess behind.’ If that was his aim, he did a perfect job.”
– An account by William Mason, one of Harlow’s students, as reported by Harlow’s biographer Deborah Blum in The Monkey Wars (Oxford University Press, 1994)
George Bernard Shaw, who lives next door in a sunlit bungalow surrounded by his wild orchids and well-trimmed shrubbery, is not good friends with Harry Harlow. Commenting on his neighbor’s achievements, Shaw once remarked, “Atrocities are not less atrocities when they occur in laboratories and are called medical research.” And although I found myself agreeing with Shaw, I did so grudgingly as it meant that I had failed as a proper wire mother to nurture Harry; to encourage him to become a man of dignity and honor—two qualities that escaped him entirely as he hurtled toward his great all-American dream and the pageantry that went with it, leaving me and his early experiments far behind.
When the humidity is just right and there is no need to worry about my teeth chattering, I find myself wondering about Harry a lot. I wonder what goes on inside that mind of his. My wires twitch and my imagined folds of skin wrinkle, sometimes in terror, sometimes in awe.
As for the offspring born out of the ghastly rape-rack-method, they ended up being ignored by their mothers, had their heads crushed by their mothers, or held down against the floor as their mothers bit off pieces of their feet and fingers. Mothers.
As a mother myself, although of the wire variety, I cannot stop seeing the triumphant glee in Harry’s eyes when he discovered the monkeys mutilating their young. I imagine his delight, the glow in his eyes, and sometimes, I feel dread constrict my nonexistent stomach, a tingling in my nonexistent knees, a weakening as the vacuum in my nonexistent throat closes in. But when the days are long and there is nothing else to do but wait for my long-gone son’s return, I dream up scenarios where I whisper to my boy as he reaches out to me for his daily ration: Come to mama, Harry. Come forth and drink your milk. The wires are waiting, waiting, waiting to prick you with their barbs, love you to hell and damnation with their invigorating pinpricks of pain. I’ll shake you and I’ll shake you and I’ll shake you until death does us part. And until then and because you need me, Harry, you need me to stay alive, the wounds from my love-embrace will continue to fester, to be reopened, to never ever heal. The blood from the wounds scoured afresh would taint everything you do and everything you are as you go fashioning despair out of steel containers, irradiating and maiming and taking what you don’t own, tying the unwilling ones to your rape rack, reintroducing them into the natural world after torturing them, when all this time you knew, Harry, you knew that they were irreparably damaged. Because nothing ever heals, my boy. Nothing really ever heals.
Age of Blight