Before This Moment Fades, We Will

His bones were hollowing themselves out.

The young man’s time was parceled and given market value, he was meant strictly to work during work hours. A few feet from the open ledge of his balcony, the neighborhood’s laundry caught a latent breeze. In this district, the dorms were arrestingly tall. Still, no railings—the thick canopy of laundry lines would probably break any fall, so no need for another construction project.

The man listened to the laundry brush against itself outside and knew he was behind schedule. He hadn’t hung his blankets yet, because he had worked the whole day. The man was a carver by trade, he carved thin silver disks into coins. No real technique to it, so long as each coin looked the same as the last, and sounded the same metallic clink when he delivered them through the collection chute. When you've carved coins this long, the metallic plating dyes your fingers the color of rotten fruit flesh, and you realize that coins aren’t genuine silver. By now, the man’s skin was gray and callused, his fingernails worn down and blackened at their tips. He was roughly fifty thousand coins, two hundred flat chisels, six hundred steel gouges, and twelve worktables old. He was nineteen parades old: Nineteen times had he seen the uniformed men from city center round the corner and disappear under the blanket racks. They filed routinely into the dorms. Never the upstairs units, only the ground floor, and only to inspect the coin deposits. And the textile baskets in the building over, the filed wood stacks and the fabric dye channels in the ones beyond that. 

But every parade was faintly thrilling, a whisper reminder that a world existed outside of this bare, concrete room. The man had no calendar or clock, so he slept on the balcony and stretched to see down the street corner first thing each morning, coy like prey, like a newborn. Sometimes, you could notice fresher rations following a parade, that was a good sign. Sometimes, you’d start getting the dregs, little to no food each day and all of it would be stale. That wasn’t good, but the parades decided your living standard and so they were important. The young man guessed that’s why everyone welcomed them, there was nothing else really worth celebrating.

That day, he was as old as his labor and as young as his ignorance.

One-and-a-half coins past noon, the feeling in his bones worsened. It had started at the base of his neck, right above the surgery scar, a staticky buzz along his shoulders, then a cold ache. The feeling was quickly relayed down each knob in his spine, and it grew to a full throb by his ankles. He sighed, shook his head, and scraped harder at the brushed metal. He couldn’t hang his blankets until he finished five coins at least, and he knew the pain wouldn’t leave until they saw that the laundry was up. Reflexively, he rolled the joints in his wrists, elbows, shoulders, everywhere it was unbearable.

It had been a few sheaths of coins since his last ration, and the exhaustion amplified the pain. His ears rang and his breath trembled. He could only keep working, and so he leaned in and carved, the coin pressing deeper into his silver palm with each frantic gouge.

Scratch. Scratch. Crack. Rip. Sing.

Slow bleed, gentle pulse. Blood blooming as the skin of his palm came unwoven, vibrant and visceral red through the synthetic gray. 

The pain left through the wound, but the ringing stayed, and the ringing helped him realize.

Shakily, with what effort he could still summon, he stood from his table. He looked around his dorm—the chute by the door, the pristine floor, the cavernous walls. The trough for feeding, the trough for water. The free flow of wind and cold, like a perpetual breath down his collar. The cot on the balcony he woke up in all that time ago, disoriented, a raw ache at the back of his neck and a dense fog enveloping his consciousness, as he strained to remember.

So he walks to that open ledge, his feet bare and uncertain. And the sky was light gray dust, a few shades from white, empty and evenly lit with no hint of a sun. It could have been blue, almost, in the blurry vignette circumferences of the light spots in his vision. The young man drinks in a new breath and imagines a sprawling future, a bygone past, assured that the sky overhead is bright and boundless. And he steps off.

And he flies. The quick and brutal pain of the fall feels like freedom. 

—

Deep in city center, a glass pendulum swung under a stone archway. Encircled by squat administrative buildings and gray residences, it barely caught any light—an uncut disk, cleaving air in its invariable path, arriving just next to the stone walls on either side, breaths from shattering. No one knew what unit of time it was meant to mark, only that it proved time hadn’t ended yet.

The officer often came here after a long day’s work. He made a point to enjoy the rare luxury given to those of his status: momentary freedom. He squatted down just inside the arch and shrunk his imposing frame to within the shade. From this distance, the sound of the pendulum parting air was like muffled thunder, and he would savor a short nap to its rhythm. Glass products had long been eliminated, the tower was a relic of the past. Maybe it was a rip in the dimension, a moving portal to a time before this one, or maybe it swung to lull a faraway, angry god to sleep. A god who demanded their clockwork routine and repetition to stay subdued. Some time ago, the officer would chuckle to himself at each new preposterous theory.

This evening, the hack of the pendulum could not disrupt his restless thoughts. East, five reports. South, three. A few dotted through the western expanse, into the valley. When they get to him, they’re sanitized and repackaged as paperwork, but lately, he can’t quit the habit of imagining the people they document. Middle-aged female, seamstress. Young adult male, minting. Elderly male, textile worker. Sometimes, they’re just found in the street, hidden from the other laborers by the laundry racks, fallen down an incalculable distance that always seems smaller than it really is. Sometimes, they’re left in their rooms until surveillance finds them. It really doesn’t matter. The administration sends crews hourly to collect any remains and clean up, so smells are not ever an issue, and all the evidence is brought back to city center. That day, the officer let his imagination carry him to the incinerator. It was an unceremonious room, with a metal oven under a large metal chimney. The officer working down there—a young girl, too young for the dust and death—saluted him when he appeared in the doorway. He walked along the array of gurneys. They just lay there, in dim and haphazard light, all still in the twists of limbs and flesh they were found in. Some caked in blood, like rust on a used metal tool. Others, the less fortunate, sinewy and shiny.

The officer stood over the bed nearest to the door and looked a long while into the young corpse’s face. He planted his heels into the floor, to brace for impact, and looked again. It couldn’t be. He stopped just short of feeling the full, protruding curve of the boy’s cheek, dipping into a low hollow, sunken and paper-thin like his own. The boy’s eyes, steely and gray under a thick glaze, just like his own. So much time had passed, but no. 

There was no mistake. The guilt he felt for the child was as fresh and as awful as the first day, the day he brought him into the world. The girl didn’t notice him and continued working in silent haste when he left.

Then, he was as old as his diligence, as young as his flickering conscience.

He ascended the stairs quietly and quickly to finish work for the day, back up at his prized office job. Typical for him, he would end the day having said little to anyone else. It was darker than usual when he slipped into the shadow under the pendulum arch, relieved to feel the stone against his back. He trained his eyes across the city center complex. He dug his tongue back against his palate and swirled nervously, gathering the saliva to swallow it back down and deeper than before: something bitter and old, something long boiling in his stomach but never dared rise up. 

The officer was a good bureaucrat. He made a point to carry the rare burden given to those of his status—consciousness, an inescapable kind, a sacred kind. He carried it well, but even metal had its expiration date, and he swore once to lay down his life for this city.

—

The vagrant was sure: She was the only one who remembered years. She was the only one who remembered months and weeks and days and minutes. It was one of the first memories she successfully called back, the fact that time used to be measured and discrete. Back where she’d worked, it was relentless. It traveled long and pulsed an unbroken rhythm. It did not punctuate life nor death, and it did not celebrate beginnings nor mourn ends. It no longer did those things.

If she had to guess, it had maybe been a month. It all started out very innocent. She had woken up in a white room, next to rows of women sleeping on gurneys. She was unbearably light, she felt an itch to push off and fly away, and she was numb all over. The vagrant had been a textile worker before she was taken to the city center, that was about as much as she remembered when she came to. The itch was unbearable, she immediately climbed up and shook out her limbs. She checked to see that she was okay, and she seemed to be. No sharp pains or soreness, just a latent headache and some scars she hadn’t noticed before, all sunken into light purple tissue already.

She climbed out through a gutter vent near the ceiling, and she remembers hesitating at the sight of the other women, worried for a second that she wasn’t meant to be awake. Nevertheless, she decided she needed the fresh air, straining to recall the last time she saw the open sky. She thought she was clever for her impromptu escape plan, when no urban planner would reasonably expect an adult woman to be so rail-thin and fit through a vent. If she intended to follow the parade outside back to her dorms, she’d forgotten by the time she left the complex. She meandered her way far outside the city, somehow. A while beyond the last dorms was a forest, and without a second thought, she climbed the nearest brush and settled on a nest of foliage. As soon as she lay down under the stars, she slept like the dead, drunk on clean wet air, and she slept for days. She hadn’t realized how spent and well-worn her body was.

The next few weeks, she spent her time scavenging for food and staring out at the city. The insignificance of those concrete buildings gave her a headache. She was confused—all those lifetimes spinning thread in a dorm that fit the whole world, and now she couldn’t tell which building had been hers. And whatever memories she could summon were barely her own: fabric dye on her fingers, the muted ticking of a stopwatch, the warmth of grey-blue sky. Moments not marked by time, that ran together until they were far and unidentifiable in the distance. It took a month for the distance to sink her into misery, a slow kind that debilitated her while she lay in the brush.

Along with timepieces, she also remembered eras. She remembered childhood, the downhill tumble toward maturity. The things that marked points in a child’s life where their growth accelerates for a season: a mother’s lips against the threadbare skin of her forehead, the doting rock of a father’s arms, hard gravel and concrete in cuts on her knees, tantrums, stretch marks, the guttural feeling of loneliness, the guttural feeling of love.

She wondered what she really wanted. Surely, it wasn’t to return? What was left for her? A city in the wind, without a single wall or railing, open and unassuming, indifferent to whether she left or stayed. Was that her place?

She leaned back her head until all she saw was thick, dark canopy. She could slowly sedate herself on the welcome dark, the foreign watery scent of bark and leaves. She could stay a while, tangle her limbs through the undergrowth. There was nothing good waiting for her back at the dorm. However many years she’d been alive, it had been long enough to know her fate after what had happened: The men would work until their bodies gave out, the women would reach middle age and be snuck from their dorms. When she was first woken from her sleep by one of those bureaucrats, she was even a little excited to see what lay beyond her dorm. They rushed her toward city center and into the underground facility, where she was prodded for days. She must have lost a gallon of blood to tests and quickly wanted for the easy familiarity of her dorm again. No one thought to give her any information until before the first procedure, and they resolved to keep her underground for what must have been months after.

She remembered most the boredom of those months, being able to do little more than lay in her assigned hospital bed and pace her few tiles of personal space. Usually, she would most of each day away, at least enjoying not having to work. She stayed up just long enough to finish her daily rations and idly watch her body change, her stomach swell and her skin streak. She’d often wake with a migraine or an all-consuming impulse to vomit, which she would take care of promptly on the floor beside her bed. 

Her memory of the latter few months in the facility had long faded into oblivion, and her very next memory was the white room and the gutter vent. What they don’t tell you about memory is that it’s the conquering of time. It’s the fight to organize experience, reduce it to a small enough size to swallow down and forget about later. Or optimistically, it’s burning a time in life down into a tangible and understandable souvenir, to notice and love again somewhere down the line or let collect dust. Knowing how time passes, knowing that time passes, what came before and what will come after, forms memory, when you can rest easy knowing that the best is maybe soon to come, and the worst that’s ever happened to you is over and done with and leaves just a thought. An echo, for you to do with what you wish. 

Her days were cleaved clean from one another, she had no way of knowing when something was over. She could not anticipate nor reminisce, she could not recover nor hope for the better. But she felt grief and despair and resignation, somewhere through the lightness and numbness. Loss—losing his touch, his fragile baby skin against her nervous chest, losing his delicate face, foreign steely eyes over an almost theatrical frown that mirrored her own one-to-one, losing the fluttering of his uncertain breaths and the sound of his watery sobs. There was no way around something already buried into her flesh and core. Memory is manmade and artificial, but loss is inalienable. 

She looked for stars through the trees again, but this time, they seemed to flicker out. Each time she focused on one, it blinked a bit, and, a short struggle later, gave out. They did so in quick succession. One by one, the stars quivered and died, snuffed out under the tongue of the soot sky. Because maybe there were no stars, inside the city and out. There was only sky and heavy grey sky.

That day, she was old, as old as all repeated history, and tired down to the marrow of her bones. She sank deep into the wet soil. 

—

“Be excited! Be very excited.”

Somewhere under the city center, a white-haired man laughingly chides a pregnant woman. She lies on her back in a sterile hospital bed, squinting under the stark lights. She smiles sadly at the man and nods out of courtesy. Somewhere outside the operation room, there are mumbling arguments about a missing laborer woman, patterns of police reports, an emerging epidemic, sanitation infrastructure. 

“What is there to fear? Surely not the procedure.” The man’s voice numbs her nerves like dry ice on a wound.

The woman places a hand over her stomach and feels a pulse, straining to reach her palm. In her weakness, she lets the man dab sweat from her forehead and rest his thumb on her temple. Her breath grows labored and uneven.

“It’s the most natural thing, more natural than the birth itself.” The man had wide-set and refined features, and he wore them pleasantly, mildly. He had papery and pockmarked skin, stretched tight over protruding cheekbones. His eyes were the color of just-processed steel, but they were also hazy and faraway in a contemplative way. His voice made the woman want to believe him.

A thud can be heard from outside the cracked door. A new voice—an older man, and he’s angry, demanding—breaking and stumbling before it dissolves into more commotion. The woman isn’t sure where she is, who’s outside, but she hears multiple sets of quick, military footsteps before the noise is subdued. The attending nurse peeks outside and turns back immediately, her eyes blown wide. “Sir, something’s happened. It’s Officer—”

“That’s of no concern right now. Close it, please.” The man sends the nurse a look, his head angled so the woman couldn’t tell his expression from where she lay. When he returns to her side though, he is as pleasant and calm as ever. “Nothing could be of higher concern than this. This is a new life, nothing could ever be a greater gift to you. To us.”

The woman stretches instinctively to wrap both arms around her swollen stomach—not only in tenderness and love, but in farewell. She shifts into a final embrace for the daughter who she knew would be gone the next time she woke up. 

“The administration is not perfect. It’s often stuck managing human error and treason, as you likely presume now.” He straightens again and smiles at the nurse with each slitted wrinkle. “But it’s the best we’re capable of.” The old man leans directly over the woman, and the shadows make him terrifying for an instant. “The pendulum of our known universe veers and slows, but it arcs towards permanence.”

The mother begins to cry silently, her face still set in its hollow smile. 

“Towards stability, eternity. Trust that, in a life of moments and circumstances, this reality you know will persist forever.”

She huddles herself over her daughter to protect her for the last time.

“And in a mother’s life, this is her absolute proudest moment. In our history, another breath and beating heart devoted to eternity.”

The man produces a silver antique coin, carved by hand and meticulously polished,  and rolls it rhythmically across his jagged knuckles. His face is genuine and cold and bathed in warm glow again.

“Permanence is our divine virtue. It’s our only commandment. Your child is soon to know her place in our city, her”—the coin catches the light—“worth. Now, that should be your proudest moment.”

The man’s hand is chilled and easy against her feverish skin when he guides her to bend her torso over her legs. He beckons for the anesthesiologist to come over and moves his hand to the nape of her neck, right where her scar aches with stress. The mother feels the needle in her lower back, his mild touch on her scar.

“You’re proud, are you not?” The man helps her lie back down and has the surgeons ready themselves to reopen the scar in the back of her neck first, then proceed with the delivery. The lights start to bleed into one another, they’re white-hot against her bare skin.

“Yes.” Her voice is bare and broken. The room dissipates in her vision until it’s nothing but gray static, so light and desaturated it could almost be the fresh blue of a morning sky. The man’s quiet words resound inside her. She’s no longer crying, she couldn’t imagine a reason to ever cry. There is no despair, no misery, no death nor pain nor blood. There is no experience, only gentle and welcomed sedation. 

There is no experience, and so there are no people.

She’s never felt so sure in her life. “Yes, I am proud.”

But she will nonetheless feel it when the pulse is lifted from her still-warm stomach, each pull of the scalpel as she is opened and gutted to never feel quite whole again, even when she gives up all memory of her daughter.

Her child, a baby girl, an uncertain number of years and eternities ahead of her. As young as her mother’s love, as young as new want and new loss, as young and as fragile, swallowed and carried far away by the periodic tide.