BABYLONICA
by Jessi Rich
She likes to pretend it’s breathing.
The willow tree stands alone at the city center, its long, floor-sweeping boughs encased in an overturned wine glass, ventilation slats carved into its stemless top. The lone tree is the first thing visible from the gaping mouth of the Main Street subway station, the view from every rounded window of the city hall hunching close around it. Families pose for pictures; people in clinging clothes perform yoga and calisthenics and tai chi as if the tree is watching. The glass prison is grubby with fingerprints and the smudges of toddler’s faces.
If a strong enough wind blows by, the air clambers in and the weeping leaves shiver and curl like a back braced against the cold. She imagines him breathing, freckled chest expanding and contracting again like a shuddering galaxy. Most of him is imagined now. If it’s a memory, she wouldn’t know.
She touches the glass, expecting it to pucker her palm with the biting cold, but it is warm and sweating with eternal spring. She presses her fingers into it, hard. Harder than that. She dares it to break.
At the edge of the subway platform was a strip of red peeling paint imploring all who stood before it to go no further. Finch listened at first, standing somewhat removed from the quietly shuffling crowd of commuters and soaking them in: their ringing cell phones and their bleeding music, their cigarette smoke, their eau de parfum. She was already painting, the crowd a harsh stipple, the speeding train a long, half-dried swipe.
By the time Blue appeared, Finch was at the center of the stripe, the tips of her patent leather flats taunting the edge of the platform. Not far enough to fall, but still close enough for the hot rush of air to convince her body she was floating. Danger. That was the word. Thrill?
The train doors hissed wide and Finch retreated. She didn’t see him until his hand was around her arm, until his watery eyes swam into view and demanded an explanation from her. He sputtered, “Finch?” and then, after a beat of hesitation: “Don’t. Don’t throw it away now.”
She laughed, but it was more of a cough. “I’m not dying, Blue,” she said as she broke free of him and pushed through the turnstiles. “I’m painting.”
Spoken to anyone else it would have been nonsense, but because it was Blue, because he’d been at every exhibition from Hatred to Nausea to Love, his pale eyes were rife with understanding. “For the ceremony,” he said, and though his voice held the barest suggestion of a question, it fell flat. “The submissions are due in a week, you know. Aren’t you a bit behind?”
Finch scoffed, following the crowd as it corralled onto the escalator. Blue shouldered next to her, his freckled hand freezing where it brushed hers. His hands had always been cold, ever since the illness had taken everything but his life. “I’m adding a few embellishments,” she explained. “You’re one to talk, by the way. Your greatest masterpieces were completed in four hours. Dafne’s one efficient machine; I’ll give her that.”
She expected some sort of acidic quip, and for a moment the beginning of one was behind Blue’s eyes. Finch watched it sink away somewhere. “Trust me,” Blue said. “I don’t think this one will be quite like the others.”
The escalator was reaching its destination, the first threads of melted butter daylight stretching from the end of the tunnel. Finch squinted, taking Blue by the shoulders and moving him so he blocked the glare with his height. “Blue.”
“What?”
“When you look at my work, what do you see?”
He pondered the question: eyebrows, fair as snow against his dark skin, pulling close to each other. “The easy answer would be whatever it is you want me to see. Whatever sensation you’ve chosen.”
“The actual answer?”
The escalator reached the top, and Blue turned just in time to avoid tripping over the disappearing steps. “Anger,” he said. “Not necessarily about the same thing every time. But…anger.”
The exodus poured out onto the street, dispersing throughout the square like a stream split by stones. Guardian Square. For now, it was a great empty space, a radial array of nothing around a dim calcified stain that marked the grave of a marble fountain. In a week, it would be a monument.
The Guardians lined neighborhoods, waited in hotel lobbies, stood guard at the entrance to the city. It was the first time one of the ventilators would be placed here, in the center of it all. A Guardian to guard all the rest.
He asked her, “Are you angry at me?”
Finch got the feeling it was a question to which he didn’t really want the answer. Pure ink eyes gleamed with competition. “Wait until the ceremony,” she said, “and you’ll see.”
Tuesday it rained and painted the city wet as an oil slick. Blue crossed the stretch of concrete between his home and his studio with his head ducked against the onslaught, water trailing in rivulets from the ends of his damp hair. He stepped inside and one aroma bled into the next, damp grass and soaked earth into turpentine and acrylic.
Dafne was busy. In the center of the studio’s covered floor the massive canvas sat propped up on an iron easel, a dash of red streaking across the white as if left there by a blood-smeared palm. Dafne had parked herself in front of it, her six metal hands each clutching a paintbrush, the wide desk next to her proffering both a paint-crusted palette and a spread of graphite concept sketches. The arc of computers behind her whirred and buzzed, external synapses, firing just the way Blue had taught them. Slow, haunting piano notes echoed out from Dafne’s speakers, and Blue paused and listened. Satie, maybe.
“Careful,” came the robot’s voice from a different speaker, as Satie softened into the background. “You’re tracking in water.”
The rain tipped and tapped upon the studio’s prismatic glass ceiling; Blue tilted his head back, watching the water glide off its surface. “I’ll stay over here,” he said. Then: “Red?”
Dafne’s chassis swiveled towards him first, and then her screen. She said, “I thought maybe it was time to try new things. Artists must always be innovating.”
Blue released a cluck of amusement. She often quoted his own lines back at him, a mirror reflecting light. “What happened to the ocean, then?”
“You’ll see,” said Dafne, turning back to her canvas. “It’s not a new idea. My best ideas are always the ones you forgot about.”
Blue frowned. There was a time just after he’d created Dafne that he understood her. He had so many more questions now, and less time to ask them. “Dafne,” he said, venturing to the edge of the work desk but no further, water droplets trailing him. He lifted one of the sketches, his thumb smudging the graphite. “We’re even after this. She’ll understand, right?”
The robot didn’t turn from her task, but she paused, her arms frozen in mid-air, casting spindly shadows across the canvas like chrome tree limbs. “That’s a conjecture I’m not qualified to make.”
Blue tried again. “If I asked you to lie to me?”
“You don’t need me for that.” Dafne shook with a mechanical bout of laughter, and the brush began to dance again. “If she doesn’t understand, does it change what you have to do?”
Blue stared at her for a moment, his eyes tracing the confident swing of her arms, color bleeding from the brush’s bristles. He knew the answer. “I have to go to my appointment,” he announced, shrugging his bag further up his shoulder. “Do you need anything?”
Red bloomed behind Dafne’s brush like a chemtrail. “Don’t get sick,” she said. “I have heard the process is slower that way.”
Finch didn’t think anger covered it. She figured it was married to confusion, to grief—to something that couldn’t be contained within a word. That was why she painted: to take everything back, to explain things, to bleed in a way she could control.
The first canvas she worked on for three hours before tossing it in her broom closet and vowing never to look at it again. When she set down the second, she turned up the bass on her speakers until the house shook with each crash of the drums. Thrill. Her tongue was drunk with it—thrilllll. How do you distill a word? You destroy it.
She cut first with a box cutter, dragging it down through the paper in long, clean lines, wrist to elbow. She stippled these sections in, smudged them gray as ash. She dug her nails in afterwards, clawing through the canvas as if through mud. These she marked in trails of red, the crimson of an autumn lost to time. Finch stepped back, lingered, considered. It didn’t make sense, but she didn’t want to make sense. She wanted eyes, attraction, intrigue.
Blue called her; if not for the vibration of the phone against her leg she would have missed it. She didn’t know she was out of breath until she tried to speak.
“What?” she said. “Are you dying?”
He sounded oddly grave. “Very slowly.”
“Same as the rest of us, then.”
“Listen.” His voice crackled as if carried in the wind. “I have a strange question.”
“I’m working.”
“Just one.”
Finch sighed, which Blue took as an invitation to go on. “In the hospital back then, after they treated me? We didn’t know each other. There was no reason for you to visit. Why did you come see me?”
“Easy,” Finch said, because it was. “I wanted you to look me in the face. I wanted you to know that you owed me.”
A pause—a thick silence, the kind that stuck. Finch waded into it. “Blue?”
“Thank you. That’s all I needed to know.”
He hung up, and Finch’s gaze lingered on the phone afterwards. For once, the taste of something else was in her mouth. Regret, dry as cotton. She couldn’t swallow around it.
For an hour or so Blue’s existence was questioned and prodded and inked over until he no longer understood it himself.
The doctor regarded him with two wary gray-rimmed eyes and held out a small metal box in his direction. “Put your finger here.” Blue did; the contraption licked off his fingerprint and spit him back out again. Pleased, the doctor asked, “Have you had a fever recently?”
“No.”
“Any cold, flu? Any illness at all?”
“Besides the one.”
“The one?”
“The miasma,” he reminded him. Back then, he was nine, Finch eight. She held a tendril of Blue’s hair between her fingers, rubbing it like she expected a dust of sugar to fall from the ends. There were only one or two black strands left then, darts of ink dropped in a bowl of milk. Do you wish you’d died, too? Finch had asked. He answered, I don’t know.
The doctor’s eyes flickered with recognition, and he scribbled something onto his tablet. “Right. You were lucky,” he said, which Blue figured was an oversimplification. He shifted on, his voice slightly unsteady. “Do you exercise?”
“Occasionally.”
Scribble. “How about your diet?”
“Fine.”
Tap. “And have you broken any bones in the last year or so?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“That’s the sort of thing you would be aware of, would you not?”
“Well, yes. I suppose so.”
Scribble. “Last. Are you ready and willing to take up this honor bestowed upon you?”
The doctor didn’t look up from his tablet, and Blue watched the stylus, long and slender as a blade, as it hovered over the screen. He said, “Of course.”
The doctor’s face opened into a smile, one that crinkled his eyes in the corners and punctured a dimple in his cheek. He turned the tablet in Blue’s direction, a silent order to sign. “Congratulations, Blue.”
He barely felt the needle go in. The only proof it did at all was the blood that bloomed between the slice, alizarin crimson, a slow sick ooze.
At first it is a dream she has. Guardian Square is empty, a ghost town buried under a heap of fresh snow. When she glides up to the transparent cage the glass is warm again, almost feverish, like something within is begging to be let free. He isn’t.
Each memory is a burden borne upon her back. Now that he’s gone, she thinks of him more than she ever did while he was here. The salt-crusted sound of his voice in the morning, before his vocal cords warmed themselves. The slight lilt to his walk he spent his whole life trying to fix. His staunch commitment to a stifling lack of personal space—every time she stood next to him, his shoulder had grazed hers. It drove her crazy; she misses it now.
She’s dreaming, so of course the gun is in her pocket, sleek and beautiful and gleaming like hardened starlight. It’s light, like holding a piece of paper. She examines the muzzle, lets it kiss the flesh between her eyes. Considers it. Then she turns it towards the glass.
She pulls the trigger, the snap of it sending her staggering. When she wakes, the room is freezing cold and the darkness is tinted blue. She drags a trembling hand across her forehead. Her mouth tastes like smoke.
That night, the room orbited around him, Blue hovering between the marble statues and the Impressionist exhibit like the museum’s own personal star. Finch stood in the sheaf of moonlight that poured down through the glass ceiling, the notes of the cello concerto ringing out somewhere vibrating in her blood, though she couldn’t hear it. Clinking wine glasses and forced laughter bled all over the sound.
The interviews were rushed and hazy: a dream sequence. There would be even more of them at the ceremony tomorrow. What do you have to say about your work? What’s your process been like leading up to this year’s Guardian Ceremony? Miss Finch. Miss Finch, how are you feeling about Blue’s withdrawal from the competition? Only the last question grabbed her and shook her awake.
Finch nabbed a glass of champagne from a passing tray and retreated to where the crowd dwindled, the museum’s great halls throwing her footsteps back at her, every sound embellished with a rounded, muffled edge. The Guardian at the hall’s center stretched its limbs towards the skylight, the trunk of the great oak arced like the back of a dancer. It towered over her, beautiful and remarkably indifferent.
“Everyone’s eyes are on you,” said Blue from behind her, and Finch turned, glimpsing him over her shoulder. One foot dragged after the other, the rhythm more severe than before. “But I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
Finch pivoted back towards the tree behind the glass. “How kind of you to lie. The only reason anyone looks at me is to see you.”
“Not anymore,” he said, and his voice grew firm. “Not this time. Tomorrow it’ll be different.”
Finch laughed, a bitter sound. “It won’t,” she told him. “It won’t change a thing. You still get the contracts, the interviews, the exhibitions. You’re the survivor, the underdog, the pretty boy everyone’s rooting for. All I wanted was a fucking chance, Blue. God, sometimes I—I think if I’d had the choice I wouldn’t have saved you.”
The words settled like a foul scent in the air. There was no shock on Blue’s face—only a quiet and straining desperation. He lifted Finch’s hand, and she let him, his thumb resting at the base of her wrist. She thought she could see it somewhere in his eyes, a younger version of him, holding a miracle in his hands and doing everything he could not to break it.
Blue. She pictured herself saying it. Blue, I didn’t—
“I’m telling you this now because I’m realizing it’s the only time I can,” said Blue, “but I’m sorry, Finch. You’re right. You should have had the choice.”
She shook her head, the words utterly nonsensical to her. “Why did you drop out?”
“Easy,” he said, and smiled, though there was something off about it. “There was something more important.”
“Can’t you just tell me what’s going on with you?”
The look in his eyes turned rueful. “Wait until the ceremony,” he said, “and you’ll see.”
When he returned from the gala, Blue stood in the dark and spoke with the Guardians.
At first when the doctors had nestled the node behind his ear and the room had rippled, making itself into what Blue thought was a forest, dazzling and green, he’d been nothing but confused. Whatever the trees were saying to him, if they were saying anything, he could not understand it.
He’d told the doctor, “It sounds like nothing. No. Like someone’s whispering too low for me to hear it.”
“Give it a week,” the doctor said. “It’ll make sense once you’re further along.”
The most talkative of them was the sycamore. Blue had seen it in real life once—they’d planted it just outside a computer factory, where the miasma rose the thickest. The tree’s lush canopy was a vivid splattering of paint against the gray, and inside the database it was even brighter, as if the liquid sun shone from within the leaves themselves.
The others asked more, said the sycamore, speaking in wind-ruffled susurrations that resolved themselves a moment later into words. You too should try. No question is a bad one.
Blue stooped to run his fingers over the grass. He’d never seen something so green before. “What should I be asking?”
The trees hummed together in thought and quiet discussion. The sycamore answered, Ask about pain. About memory. Ask me why. That is what all of us asked.
“How much do you remember, then?” Blue asked, though he hesitated, the question already heavy with its own answer the moment it rested on his tongue. “Of the people you left behind?”
Nothing.
“About yourself?”
My name may have started with R. Besides that, nothing.
“And you don’t miss it.”
Miss what? This was the only important thing I ever did, said the sycamore. Besides. You’ll find freedom in forgetting.
“But not in being forgotten.”
I’m sorry?
“Even if you don’t know them anymore, they still do. The people who knew you when you were still people,” Blue said. He closed his eyes. “I’m telling myself it doesn’t matter so long as my debt is paid, but I don’t think Finch will agree.”
The sycamore hummed in thought again. It told Blue, Come closer.
Blue approached the sycamore’s vast trunk, which was three or four Blues wide. He placed a tentative hand against it, and drew his arm back again, startled by the rough scratch of the bark against his palm. Beyond the database, to touch a Guardian was to touch only glass, the cold shell that protected their manufactured ecosystems. The world he lived in had no room for such texture.
A tree limb lowered itself, waxy leaves scraping across Blue’s face. They said you were the most beautiful of us, said the sycamore, and it sounded pleased, somehow. They did not lie.
Blue moved the limb away and staggered backwards. He dug his fingers into his knee—the muscles were tight, more wood than muscle at all. “Yes,” he said, the words a whisper of exhaustion. “That’s what they all say.”
Did they tell you what you would make?
Blue shrugged. “The doctors weren’t sure. An elm, maybe.”
Willow.
“Really?”
You will make a beautiful willow, said the sycamore. Isn’t that why you chose this?
His house isn’t his anymore. According to the city it belongs to them, to be bought and sold and repurposed at their discretion. According to her, it belongs to no one. Eternally masterless, suspended in waiting.
If she thinks of it this way, she isn’t trespassing, merely visiting. The dream still singes the edges of her mind as she creeps up to the wire fence, rusted and sinking into the dirt. Around her is the sort of night that clings, the darkness hooking its fingers in her clothes.
She pauses a moment to ponder the two stars, three stars, five—poking through the fog of clouds. He would know their names. That was what she’d liked about him the first time they’d met, the recovery center’s fluorescent air cloying with the scent of artificial lavender and bile. He seemed to know everything, or at least enough absurd facts to make the real world less real. He knew about her, too. You’ve never gotten sick, have you? They say your blood can cure me. The voice in her head isn’t his, but it’s close enough. Careful, he is saying. They’re going to use you all up.
At the fence’s base the wires curl up from the ground like paper cringing at the heat of an open flame. She bends, prying at it, scraping her fingers, and shimmies herself through. She waits for a moment, but there is no wailing siren or glaring lights. There’s nothing. Of course there’s nothing.
His studio is a diamond cleaved in half, sparkling and geometric as an insect’s carapace. Synthesized flowers line its circumference in vibrant pinks and purples and all of the shades of blue. She is not the first to visit.
She is the first to make it inside. The door blends with the chrome exterior, but even in abundant shadow she still finds the grooves, digging in until one of her nails lifts itself from the bed and she cradles it close, biting back a wail.
There is a hum from within, and a quiet clicking noise. It grows louder until she hears the metal-edged voice, a warped version of itself now, though she supposes they are all warped in some way. “Finch?” the voice says. “Is it you?”
She has never been more glad to hear the robot speak. “Dafne.”
The robot whirs and clicks and whirs and clicks until a thin metal finger inserts itself in the door jamb and pulls the door wide. Dafne regards her from the shadows of the studio, the edge of her chassis outlined in silver moonlight. Rust has claimed most of her limbs and her screen is dim, flickering. A circuit board dangles in front of her, suspended in a sea of looping wires like a heart mid-leap from the chest. Finch’s stomach churns with disgust, an ancient and diluted thing now.
“You’re not going to come inside?” Dafne says, the words halting, skipping over each other. “I know what you came for.”
Finch tiptoes through the gap, her footsteps echoing dully back at her, bouncing off the studio’s dinged ceiling. Inside, it is must and alcohol and sawdust. Canvases, blank and painted, decorate the floors. The work desk is a careless collage of acrylic paint and dried glue and shredded paper. A paint can nearest Dafne rests precariously on its side, the midnight blue pool inching towards her wheels.
“They’re going to get rid of you soon,” Finch says. “You’ll be recycled.”
Dafne’s screen flashes. “I have done…all the things I need to.”
“Not yet,” Finch says, sifting through the artwork at the desk, shuffling the canvases around like a deck of cards. She hefts one in her arms, frowning: the canvas bleeds out from a single red stripe. “Tell me, Dafne. He must have said something to you before he went. You were his brain.”
“It’s less clear now,” says Dafne. Whir-click. Whir-click. “I am less sure now.”
“You said you knew what I came for,” Finch says, the snatches of dried paint like a rough scratch of granite below her fingers. “So tell me.”
Dafne twirls in a slow, mindless circle. Then she tells her. “It’s a story you have probably heard before, though it begins a long time ago. A boy sits withering in a hospital. The same disease that has killed his parents and his brother and everyone he knows is killing the forests, is killing the world, is killing him. Then: a savior, a girl. She gives him his life back.”
Finch keeps her eyes low, tracing the loops of his signature, spacious swoops of ink. Everything about him was larger than life, a voice always just a decibel too loud. She exhales, a deep, nebulous ache clawing its way through her ribcage. She knows how the story ends.
“So when the time comes, he gives his life back. For her. For everyone,” says Dafne. “If it wasn’t him, it would’ve been you. Only those who’ve weathered the miasma can lift it.”
Finch’s eyes find the eight tiny numbers below Blue’s name, dating the painting back to just before the ceremony. She drops the canvas with a clatter and sinks slowly to the floor, chin pressing into her knees. Dafne’s voice grows more warbled, more nonsensical, with every word. Everything sounds as if it’s underwater. Everything slips, trembling, through her fingers and down the drain. “I was never going to beat him, was I?”
“You are the one still here. You are the one…still creating,” Dafne sputters. “Who really wins?”
Finch pushes her hands up into her hair and lets the cool air lick at her neck. She looks at Dafne, which is like looking at Blue, until she can’t anymore. She swipes her fingers through the thick blue puddle of paint oozing across the floor and swallowing the moonlight. The sizzle of rage is ash in her mouth now, asphyxiated with nothing to feed it. When she drags her hand down, eye to cheek, she can almost pretend he’s touching her.
Even now she could not look at the sky without remembering the days when it bled, sick green and murky black, heavy with pestilence. On the day of the ceremony the world overhead was unnaturally blue, the air thin and tasting of distilled sunlight. Guardian Square was strung with wreaths and ribbons and bells and everywhere Finch looked there was color—candied apples lacquered in vermillion, rose pink champagne twinkling between the attendees’ fingers, and the tall mystery shimmering in the square’s center, encased in gold.
Thrill. She stood before her painting and watched it speak. It was a collage of newspapers and paperbacks and the skid of tires. It was the edge of the red stripe, pushing home. It was the breath before the plunge. She drifted backwards as the crowds filtered by, a passive observer, an omnipotent eye. The numbers below the piece ticked up and up and up. The bids nudged at Finch’s personal record, then tripped over it.
She found herself searching the crowd for a sheaf of white hair, an uneven walk. Her ears strained for any hint of Blue’s voice, the ends of which the miasma had dragged and left raspy. But perhaps he had decided no part of the ceremony was worth his time at all. She found nothing but Blue-less space.
The bells lining the square rang all at once, and the city turned in a hush to face the golden tarp, glittering like the surface of the sun. Standing before it, the mayor was nothing more than a doll. “The illness has touched us all,” she began, “even if we were lucky enough to escape it, or if it was before our time. I remind you this ceremony is not one to mourn all the miasma has cost us, but to celebrate our triumph.”
The ensuing applause was polite and scattered. Finch’s eyes scraped the crowd once more.
“A special thanks to all of the artisans, artists, specialists, all of you who have come together to celebrate the installation of our new Guardian,” said the mayor, as the tarp quivered and began to rise. “May he cleanse and protect this city for years and years to come.”
Finch wasn’t sure how she knew. There was no indication, no characteristic left of him in the tree’s impassive face—no map to his being or the being he had been in the carved whorls of the bark. Later she will hardly remember the moment the tarp dropped, the heavy cloth pooling at the foot of the glass like molten gold. She will remember the silence, the violent suck as the air left her ears. The confetti, settling like multicolored dust against the willow’s weeping leaves.
Thrill. Such a vacant word now. The cheers erupted in a vacuum, and Finch was utterly untethered, free-floating in space. It was like the residual throbbing of a phantom limb. Nothing to feel but nothing at all.
The sky is pitch; the city is sleeping. Perhaps no one will notice the smoke.
Finch is awake. For the first time in forever, it is a fierce, bleeding sort of consciousness, every edge sharp as a needlepoint. Here, encased in inky shadow, the willow is an eldritch thing, groaning in the wind, limbs like spindly tentacles. Finch braces her fingers around the awkward weight in her hands, smooth cold metal under her skin. It’s just like her dream. It’s entirely different.
There is no point waiting. She has waited enough, and if she lets the stillness wash over her any longer she is sure she will simply dissolve. Finch is inside out and outside in; Finch is pressing the gun’s mouth to the glass; Finch is firing and firing until it shatters.
Shards of glass bury themselves beneath her skin, her face streaked with blood as she staggers towards the tree’s base. When she touches him, tracing the tree’s knotty roots up to its cavernous trunk, again she imagines him breathing. Pulsing, alive under her.
Thrill.
It is a set of steps she has already completed before, whether it was entirely her idea or not. She douses the base in gasoline, throws the tank away with a crunch as it crushes the glass into even tinier shards. Small squares of light flicker to life in the buildings around her—she has committed the cardinal sin of making noise, and this is the last moment alone with him that she will ever have.
“If you wanted to pay me back, you should have stayed,” she tells him. She thought the words would dig in, leave grooves in her throat, but she’s far too numb. “We were never meant to create alone.”
A night wind drags its fingers through the willow’s leaves. Maybe Finch is half asleep, or maybe he is crying out for her. She fumbles two matches before at last she lights the third and lets it drop.
The flames dazzle her blind.
About the Author
Jessi Rich is a recent Georgia Tech graduate in Literature, Media, and Communications and Applied Languages and Intercultural Studies (Japanese). An aspiring speculative fiction novelist and screenwriter, she loves video games, hip hop dance, and thunderstorms. She is currently pursuing a Masters in World Literatures at the University of Oxford.