The house of her childhood: from the street a stolid square clapboard house, two stories offering a row of large multipaned windows. It hid its secret, that it was built around a courtyard like the synagogue she had always gone to, the one called the Synagogue of Water. No one before the twenty-first century had ever loved flowers and fruiting trees and little birds and the simple beauty of green leaves as did those who lived after the Famine, for whom they were precious and rare and always endangered. Shira had been born since the Famine, after the rising oceans had drowned much of the rice and breadbaskets of the world, after the rising temperatures had shifted the ocean and air currents, leaving former farmlands scrubland or desert, after the end of abundant oil had finished agribusiness on land; yet the consequences and tales of the Famine had shaped her childhood too.
Malkah was waiting in the courtyard. “Ah, Shira, you’re home at last.”
“Since Ari was born, I’ve wanted to bring him here and let you get to know each other. Here I am but without my son. What good is it?”
“Time for you to come home. But it’s dangerous here. We’re under siege. We’ll talk about it later. Now come and let me hold you.”
Malkah felt smaller to her, far more fragile, and yet solid enough. The yellow rose still twined on the wall, the courtyard was still planted with peach and plum trees, grapevines and cosmos and tulips, squash and tomato vines, a garden of almost Eden. Shira held Malkah close, feeling a sense at once of her grandmother’s strength and age. Malkah had always seemed old to Shira, because Malkah was Bubeh and grandmothers were old, but Shira recognized in retrospect that Malkah had been a young and extremely vigorous grandmother. Malkah was born in 1987, so she would be seventy-two now.
Shira felt a lightening all through her as if tension so longstanding she had not even recognized it as tension had eased suddenly, a high-pitched background whine of machinery suddenly cutting off so that a blessed and startlingly rich inner silence flowed through her. This was the home she had fled, not from an unhappy childhood but from too early and too intense love, paradise torn.
FIVE
Fifteen Years Before: The Day of Alef
At thirteen, Shira loved passionately and secretively and was loved in return. However, she also knew this to be a state outlawed and demeaned by everyone except Gadi and herself.
She did not love Gadi alone, only most fiercely. She also loved her grandmother Malkah and her big sleek brown cat, Hermes. Hermes had been hers since she had found him as a kitten abandoned in the raw, where he would have died, for he was not adapted to survive out there. He was valuable, because the town was plagued with mice. Mice and mosquitoes liked life under the wrap. He was precious to her because he loved her uncritically, undemandingly, unendingly. Malkah’s love was strong but abrasive, scrubbing her clean. Gadi’s love bore both roses and thorns, like the immense climber outside her bedroom window, swarming all the way up the courtyard wall.
Her grandmother had raised her, as was the custom with women of her family. Malkah told her that when a woman had a baby, it was of her line. Men came, men went, but she should remember that her first baby belonged to her mother and to her but never to the father. Malkah said love was mostly nonsense and self-hypnosis, and men were by and large fine to work with and fun in bed, but never expect much otherwise. Of her Malkah expected much. She was the daughter of the line.
Shira knew better. At thirteen, she knew much more about love than Malkah. Malkah might say men were transitory, but Gadi was not. Gadi had been hers since they met in second grade, when his family moved here. Gadi said they were fated, they were bound. Other people wandered the earth their whole lives looking for their twin, their lover, their other self who would complete them and answer their deepest hungers, but Gadi and she had found each other so early that no one could ever slip between them. Still, it was not easy, loving him as intensely as she did. He was not easy. The world thought of them as children, refusing to recognize their bond—for whenever it became visible, they were in trouble. Nothing felt as intense as the times when they seized hands and charged off into their own private world. At once colors gleamed. Lights grew more intense, and shadows lurked darker and scarier and more enticing. Feelings pierced her, sweet and sour as the grapefruit shipped up every winter from South Carolina.
“Let’s travel,” Gadi would say to her, and Shira would answer, “Let’s go.”
Of course he did not mean traveling really, although they planned to wander all around the world and under the sea and up to the satellite cities. They had been to those places by stimmie, but Shira was stubborn: what she hadn’t done in her own body didn’t really count. She was old-fashioned that way, as Malkah had raised her. They were just exploring their little world and pretending.
But pretend with Gadi was more real than school or stimmies or her own thoughts. In school they rarely exchanged a word, for they had evolved a body language, signals and glances quicker than others could catch on to. Since Shira was halfway through childhood, they had protected their friendship with secrecy. Boys were supposed to play with boys and girls with girls. Her best friend ought to be some creature from her class, like Hannah, who giggled constantly, or Zee, who told her mother whatever she or her friends did, idiot. No one had ever said, Gadi and Shira cannot be close, it is forbidden, but they learned to watch out for the gaze of others, their jokes, their comments, their curiosity, sticky and soiling. Even those who meant well treated their bond as cute or transitory.
For years they had concealed nothing more than that they liked to play cards together, to work on puzzles, to act out stories of heroism and rescue. It was not exactly forbidden again, but neither was it encouraged, to explore the hidden levels of the town, the old abandoned streets, the empty houses and basements, the forgotten upper stories. There they played out their dramas, their dreams, stories from the stimmies. For years she had had this magic circle they could weave about themselves, luminous with Gadi’s imagination, the place where she could never be lonely or bored. In that private world of play more intense, far more real than reality, she was whatever she longed for. Fear was a kind of background noise to growing up. They could not play in abandoned dwellings without remembering once there had been many more people in the world, too many, before the Famine, the plagues, local wars.
They both had old sec skins they kept in a shed. Some days they rushed out into the raw, beyond the wrap that kept off the poisonous rays of the sun, to walk with the thin coat of firmgel protecting them under the mustard sky. They would hike to the flooded city with its old-fashioned tall buildings, where the tide washed through marble lobbies and lapped at the broken elevators and the stairs that rose up and up. The wood and metal had been scavenged years ago. Their adventuring into the ruined city was truly forbidden and dangerous, because they never knew who or what they might meet there: roving gangs, organ scavengers who didn’t mind at all if the body they found was still moving. She loved the ocean. For years they had swum there, in spite of undertow and sharks, not always having the grease worn in the water in place of sec skins to protect against the sun’s radiation. They enjoyed undressing together, secretly, then slipping into the warm caress of the salt water. Shira swam well, and the sea braced and comforted her. In the water they were equally strong. Often she told Gadi they were both children of the sea. Gadi liked the idea of being anybody’s son except Avram’s. Gadi felt he couldn’t please his father, no matter what he did. Avram wanted a son more like himself: one with a scientific bent, disciplined, scholarly, brilliant in a narrow intense range. The more Gadi was himself, the more his father despaired of him. Gadi could only satisfy Avram by acting like somebody else, and that could never last.
Today, after school—they were both just starting high school now, for Gadi was fourteen and Shira seven months and two days younger—they told their separate stories. Shira left a message with the house that she was studying for a history test with Zee. She would be sure to get home before Malkah; however, if
she didn’t, Malkah could not stand Zee’s family and would never call them. Malkah sometimes worked at home and sometimes at the Base office. The Base was the gold mine of the town, where the systems were created that were the town’s main export. Both Malkah and Avram were Base Overseers, among the most respected scientists (or, as Malkah preferred to be called, designers) in their fields. The products and systems they developed for several multis were the foundation of the town’s independence.
Sometimes when Shira lied to the house, she felt as if the computer could tell. Like most houses, it had a female voice and a warm affect. She had always imagined it as being perhaps ten years younger than Malkah. When she was little, very little, of course, she had thought of it as alive, and sometimes still it was hard not to, for it knew so much about her and it freely uttered opinions and judgments. Malkah had enhanced it beyond the capabilities of the house computers of any of her friends. Shira did not know what Gadi told his mother. Sara was an invalid, suffering from a newly mutated virus that could not be treated. Her bones were slowly dissolving. She lived in a haze of medication, and Gadi could pass off any lame excuse on her.
As for Avram, Gadi’s father was working in the lab as usual, putting in a twelve-hour day. Neither Shira nor Gadi could remember whether Avram had worked such long hours before his wife had begun dying, but both Avram’s long hours and Sara’s illness had been going on for five years.
Today there was a storm outside the wrap, the shallow waves of the bay lashing into muddy froth, slamming on the shore. They went instead to their secret place. Avram’s lab occupied the second floor of the house where Gadi lived—along with six other families on the ground floor. Gadi said it had been a hotel, when the town was a resort. It was longish, squat, made of yellow bricks under a roof of red tiles, left over from when there had been weather falling on it. Across the front a wide veranda had once offered a place to sit, but all the wood had been scavenged and now the many doors had their own jerry-built stairs leading to the ground.
They crept up the old fire escape to the top floor of many small, unused rooms. “Imagine the maids,” Gadi said. “Like slaves.”
“They weren’t slaves.” Shira frowned at him. He always liked to dramatize everything. “They were paid.”
“Paper money,” Gadi said solemnly. He slid the window up. They had rubbed soap on it to make it slide better. He stepped in easily, gracefully, and reached to help her. Gadi had been growing fast for the last year and a half; now he was eight centimeters taller than Shira. She despaired of growing more. She was resigned to being short like Malkah. Malkah told her that for generations everyone had been taller than their parents, but no longer. In Tikva, they ate real food, but most people ate vat food, made of algae and yeasts. She had tasted it on a school trip; it was disgusting. Their teacher lectured them when they gagged on it, about two billion people who had starved to death in the Famine, when the ocean rose over rice paddies and breadbaskets of the delta countries like Bangladesh and Egypt, when the Great Plains dried up and blew away in dust storms that darkened the skies and brought early winter, when the deserts of Africa and the new desert of the Amazon spread month by month. Without vat food, most of the world would starve, as huge numbers had done in the twenties and thirties.
They climbed into the hall and took off their shoes before they crept along the dusty passageway. “Where are we going?”
“The blue room.”
It was the nicest of the rooms that still had furniture. The walls were the same faded dun as the other rooms, but on the floor was a pale blue rug; on the old metal bed, a raggedy cotton bedspread offered homely comfort. The rooms up here were barely big enough for a double or single bed, a dresser, a chair. At home she could never bring Gadi up to her room, any more than he could bring her to his. When they were younger, they had played in each other’s rooms, but now if they shut the door, their families would ask why. Like every other girl in Tikva, she had been given an implant at puberty to prevent pregnancy, but kids their age were simply not supposed to be interested in sex, and yet every kid was, in a nervous silly way.
Gadi sat down lotus position on the bed, and she sat the same way facing him. The light from the window turned his fine curly hair into a halo of down. “What do we have to eat?”
She pulled half a round loaf of rye from her bag. “Rye from the bakery and the usual.” Telapia was a staple of life in the town, part of their meekro—fish farming, growing cukes, tomatoes, peppers, all part of the same self-contained system under the wrap. They had grown up eating fish at least five days a week: the same fish.
Gadi groaned, but he reached for the food. He was always hungry. Meals in his house were haphazard. He ate at Malkah’s a couple of times a week—somehow his presence at the dinner table was acceptable, unremarkable. Shira nibbled, keeping him company. From below came the quiver of machinery, a high-frequency whine, voices raised and then lowered. The building was solidly made and gave them sufficient privacy if they were careful. Avram was downstairs in his lab. She could vaguely remember when Sara had worked in the lab with him. Now he had a young assistant, David.
They cuddled, Gadi putting his long arm around her, their legs tangled in the quilt. “Rabbi Berger didn’t have to talk to you that way,” Gadi said. “You were right, he just didn’t like the way you said it.”
She shrugged, pressing closer. “He says I have a bad attitude.”
“Good. Keep it up.”
“He’s so bony. Do you think he rattles when he runs down the steps?”
“Am I too skinny?”
“You aren’t too anything, Gadi.”
“You say that now. Do you think we’ll be like other married couples? Fighting and jabbing at each other. My parents weren’t like that, if I really remember how it was. They used to speak their own language, top speed. They’d work together all day, and then at night they’d talk nonstop as if they hadn’t seen each other for weeks.”
Gadi’s home smelled like a clinic. It was unnaturally quiet. She was used to a more cheerful and pragmatic atmosphere. Malkah believed in the creature comforts: good food, pretty dishes, curtains on the windows, comfortable healthy posture in front of the computers, the plugs kept polished, sterilized. “I wish we could live in my house.”
Gadi kissed her lightly, just a brushing of the lips. “Your house is the good place of my dreams. It’s always been that.”
“Because of the courtyard. It’s like the synagogue.” A whole meekro within the walls of her house, all green and flowering, like paradise itself. “I wish we dared be there right now.”
“We’ll have it someday. We’ll take off all our clothes and lie on the grass under the peach tree. You’re my peach. I could eat you all up.”
He was kissing her again, harder now, their lips soft and moist and avid, snatching at each other, sucking, their tongues entwined. Lately their bodies created a fierce intense place between them. For years they had been holding each other and sometimes kissing, but that part was growing stronger and more powerful. He pushed her sweater up to touch her breasts. They were growing, and he liked to play with them. It made her feel molten and as if the weight in her were shifting downward. Kissing used to be part of pretend, part of the games, but lately it was its own thing.
He fell back from her, smiling now. “Close your eyes, Shira. Close them tight. I’m closing mine. Now feel. We’re blind. We’re going to be eyeless. We’re two blind creatures meeting to explore each other. And we speak different languages, so we can’t talk. We can only touch and make noises.”
Slowly, slowly, she built his body out of the ruddy darkness of her pinched lids. The buttons of his shirt felt huge. The closure on his pants was prickly and rough to her grazing fingers. It took them what felt like hours to undress each other until they were sleekly, hotly naked together. Her breath pushed in and out of her quickly. She could feel his heart racing against her cheek. Hot and cool, curly and sleek, firm and silky, wiry, metallic. His body was a city,
vast, filling her head.
His hand came between her legs, touching her there where he had the week before when they were in the warm shallow water of the bay, dangerously swimming in defiance of sharks, finny and human, who hunted for flesh. They were defiantly swimming without protective grease, naked to the poisonous sun and the poisonous air. Then she had kicked him in surprise. Now she burned and her flesh roared around him like a fire gone wild in the wind. She pressed against his hand. He unclenched her fingers from his penis and began sliding it against her. At first he could not get in. She was frightened but she could not break the game, she did not ask what he was doing or protest. She never broke the game. It was a charm. This was where they had been leading, they both knew it.
He groaned. It was hurting both of them. They ground their bodies together in grim concentration, trying. At length he managed to push most of the way in, but then she cried out in pain and he went limp inside her. He slid out. They both laughed, holding each other.
“It’s not as easy as it feels in the stimmies.”
She snorted. “How would you know? Your parents have yours coded, same as Malkah does.”