Scrolling
March 2023 | Horror, Dystopian, SciFi | 3300 words
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I’m face to face with another woman I’ve never seen before. She’s naked, as we all are. This was difficult to cope with at the beginning. My own nakedness was only briefly a concern; once I realized I would never be able to see my own body again, I didn’t care what was exposed. Restrained at the forehead, the wrists, the ankles, and the pelvis, we don’t have options. Let them see what I can’t keep tabs on. Aside from our fingers and toes, which we wriggle feebly, our eyes are all we have at our disposal. It used to be insolent to look down at our partners’ bodies. After many turns of the dials that pin us by our backs, setting us in countless combinations, man against woman, we soon lost the facility to care what the other thought of the impious gesture. It’s delectable—the freedom of rolling our gaze up and down the curves, protrusions, crevices, hairs, over each and every cell in the delicate collage of skin that defies disintegration, hour by hour. There is nothing sexy about it. Maybe there are some here who still hold out hope for that prospect in the future. If so, I haven’t met them. Most of us understand we have no future. When the dials turn and we click into place, we know we will only see the other for a few minutes before the machines that restrain us pair us with someone new. In the little time we have, we search the other’s body, hungry for the content it provides. It’s entertainment. On a more basic level, it is the only dynamic part of our lives—what has become of them. We don’t know what is expected of us. First, we were imprisoned in isolating cells. We were then moved from the round room to the exteriors of these cylindrical towers. Now we hang with our goosebumps bristling to climate-controlled air, in what I assume is a deep warehouse, a place where the sun doesn’t show its face. There must be a reason for it. Although we’re stuck here in the darkness, they didn’t want us to be blind. Lights display us for our partners to see. It’s clear, then, that they want us looking. That’s important for whatever purpose they have. To smell, hear, speak, and see are all allowed. We can’t move or touch or taste—our bodies are fed intravenously. They must think these freedoms are dangerous to them. Or at the very least, inconvenient. The woman across from me lets her senses droop as soon as she’s had her fill of me. She disappears without having spoken a word. The dial moves her one slot to the left, so I see her give the same silent treatment to the man beside me. This man told me his name once, but our introductions happened long enough ago to mean nothing to me now. Of his features, I only know the color of his skin—tanned like mine, racially ambiguous. I hardly struck up a conversation with him. I never asked him about his friends, his family. Questions like those tend to drag our spirits down. While he takes his turn with the woman, the men to my right and I float in the void, waiting vacantly to be brought back around to face a woman on the neighboring dial. I take this time to rest. The woman who just passed between us must be falling asleep, too. The dials don’t stop turning for periods of sleep. I suspect our captors don’t understand how we crave our dreams, or how the unblinking lights confuse and force us to rest more frequently than we had in our past life. There is little else to do but rest. The man to my right, sloped slightly behind my peripheral vision on this rounded wall, looks down at all times. In the first days, he let himself get aroused, then pissed so that his stream missed the bag designed to collect his waste. He did it more than once, sprinkling the heads of those bound below and across from us. It entertained him. I was glad nothing of the sort happened to me. His folly doomed him, as the men adjacent to him began to warn every woman we came across of his subhuman nature. The time came for one of the women he watered to see him face to face. She tore into him, starting with his dick, highlighting its inadequacy. She moved her way up his body, devouring each detail and grinding her teeth on what she could observe. Out spat her vitriol. At the end, she spat for real, just managing to land a knotted glob of mucus somewhere on his leg. I couldn’t quite see from my angle, but I don’t think it was far off from his overgrown bush, which was visible even at my disadvantage. When the dial clicked away, setting the woman across from me now, he grumbled his excuses hoarsely. To tell the truth, I think he was grateful for her words. They were the last words he would receive for a long time. The piss was an accident, he claimed. But none of us have come close to making the same mistake. If for no other reason, Piss Guy’s ostracism scared the possibility out of us. I’m face to face with a woman who looks familiar. When I first caught a glimpse of her on the horizon of the dial, she struck an emotion that I thought had atrophied out of me. I expected familiarity to come sooner than this. With each successive click, I shouted for her to wake up and tell me who she was to me in our past life. Even looking at her at an angle dumped a trunk of memories over my mind. It occurs to me that I used to be a student teacher. I stood in a classroom with Mr. Horschorn and Ms. Wells. It occurs to me that she could have attended my college, or she may have been a faculty member at the school. I went to church as well—not often, but enough to let my eyes wander over to the faces on the other side of the altar. Mass at St. Thomas’s always felt like a stadium event, with the oldest patrons pushing past the college students to get in the bishop’s own communion line. She could have been in the choir. They performed at morning mass, so I only saw them a few times. I used to like going to parties on Saturday nights, sleeping through until noon on Sunday, going to evening mass instead of the morning. She could have wandered into a party, into the kitchens where I preferred to hang out and have fascinating conversations with the uninhibited drunk. She could be one of the girls that liked to bake taquitos and pizza rolls at 1 a.m. They were the best. By the time she stops in front of me, I see the gray in her skin and the odd purple blotches that have settled in her ankles. Her waist has sunk below the metal bar meant to hold her pelvis in place. Her forehead is exposed—the band that held her skull is loose, but not quite loose enough to free her head. She tried her best. But now the IV is dangling, no longer feeding her bloodstream. It’s the price she paid for attempting to break free. She can’t have been gone long—our captors surely don’t intend to keep a corpse here to rot. A frosty plastic bag crinkles out from a mechanical drawer above her waste bin, just below her feet. Two whirring rods hold the bag wide and steady. A waterfall of pale yellow liquid dribbles out of a spout above her head—we all have one. It pours over her and wets her scalp and begins to sizzle once the trails have snaked down her arms and pooled into her belly button. She turns red like a candied apple. The bag catches the remnants of flesh still attached to the bones that slip through the restraints. The liquid in the spout switches to something blue. It sprays in a cone like a showerhead, washing the blood and acid off the restraints. The topic of her replacement spreads. Would our captors find someone to fill that woman’s spot now that she’s gone? Where would they find the replacement? I run under the suspicion that we were all contained here at the same time, but the man to my left speculates that we may not all be in the same location yet. Like a pantry to a refrigerator, there may be a second location where the rest of us wait before being put in restraints to scroll endlessly. I ask him what he means by “the rest of us”—just how many does that include? He reminds me that the majority of those we’ve encountered here speak the same language. I say we might just be organized regionally. He’s adamant that the only ones trapped here, the only ones meant to be trapped here, are citizens of our country. The rest of the world lives freely. He remains adamant for as long as I’m listening, or as long as he himself cares to argue about it. Then he falls away, closing himself off to his own theories. He’s embarrassed for being affected once again by questions that we’ve long kicked under the rug, questions that have had their way with our sanity since the beginning. He sings to himself in an intentionally off-tune mutter, quietly, so that I know I’m not supposed to talk to him anymore. The dials click. Piss Guy pleads with the woman set across from him. “Look at me.” The woman, a withered slump of protruding lip, ignores him. The elderly have that look that normally pulls you out of the present, withdraws your attention. It has never been easy to meet their eyes. But Piss Guy stares intently. “Can’t you hear me?” He is hardly assertive. She is resigned to her situation. It seems nothing can persuade her to listen. We scroll around the dial until he meets the eyes of another girl—younger than most of us. “Talk to me,” he says. She’s confused by his petition. “Please,” he says. “Tell me something.” Either she doesn’t want to talk to him, or she has nothing to say. I rise to tell her this is Piss Guy, because it occurs to me that we’ve gone ages without warning anyone. He speaks again before I can get a word in. “I see brown eyes,” he says. “Eyes of someone who’s focused. You used to be a good student?” She’s disturbed. I feel sorry for these young ones. They were meant to spend these years growing, exploring, limbering their social skills. Their determination to survive is dulled. Some of them can’t imagine a life beyond objectification. They’re startled by our anguish and offended by the frustration we show while trying to get them to see things our way. “Just tell me your name,” he says. He’s already approaching defeat. She groans, growing in volume as he keeps trying, as though it’s belaboring her to be spoken to. “Or just look at me.” She already is, pressing her gaze on him with the concentrated force of someone smoothing air bubbles out of a screen protector. “What do I look like?” The bareness of his question breaks my heart, but I don’t have enough room in my chest to sympathize with Piss Guy. “Manthy,” says the girl. He and I are momentarily lost. He can’t believe she gave him anything to bite. But he catches on. “Manthy. Manthy. Manthy—” He doubles down like it’s his sworn job to speak her name. He’s laughing in a way that sinks in my stomach. I’m locked between the urge to protect Manthy and the impulse to laugh at Piss Guy’s timely plunge into madness. I look at her for a clue. She’s all wide eyes, delighted. What beautiful curves become of her cheeks. Smiling, smiling. It’s contagious, and I don’t do a thing to suppress my own glee from climbing up. “Manthy! Manthy!” He’s shouting in all directions although his head is fixed in place. His joy resounds. She laughs with him. The dial clicks, and now I’m face to face with Manthy. We’re both still relishing the inexplicable afterglow. “Wait,” she says, her voice going rigid. She tells him, “Your eyes are blue.” Startled, he voices his appreciation—a meager gurgle. “You look scared,” she adds. “And you’re hairy. More hairy than a lot of you—” “...Than a lot of us.” He nods, excited by the comparison to the other men. “What’s your name?” “Brandon.” He’s breathless. She doesn’t miss a beat: “Brandon! Brandon! Brandon!” Her shrill voice fills the cavern. The women in the row below us cackle and chatter. “Manthy! Brandon! Manthy! Brandon!” The echoes come from just one woman until voices of all kinds join in the chorus. She asks me this time, “What’s your name?” I grapple with a strange terror. Somehow, my concern now is disappointing her. Although I can feel it too, the joy the others feel makes little sense to me. I’m mortified by the possibility of losing track of this new anomaly, this happiness. As I begin to question myself, the laughter tapers. Only by being in the presence of my pause, these people can sense a return to the gloom, the monotony. “Isaiah,” I say. An apology. Releasing this information puts into perspective how little it matters. I brace myself for the others to hate me, to see how I’ve poked a ghastly hole in the silliness of this game. “Isaiah! Isaiah! Isaiah!” Manthy lets it out with gusto. Her feet flick from side to side in their restraints. Many others above and below me, and even some on dials far away—people I may never meet—repeat my name. I can’t help but smile. My face grows sore from the strain in my cheeks. I hear other names, too. When I get one, it becomes the next thing out of my mouth. I’m hungry for them, like it would be fatally rude to let one slip from my notice. The dials click. I am face to face with someone who is, for the first time, not a woman at all. Cricket is their name. I’ve never been more excited to meet a new face. I shout for everyone to hear, “Cricket! Cricket! Cricket!” The echoes of the name come in reply, but there’s something else that surfaces. In the distance, an impassioned voice wails, “Love! Cricket, sweetheart! My love!” Cricket’s eyes flick frantically. “Telly?” “You’re alive!” “Telly!” We join in readily: “Telly! Telly! Telly!” “That’s my boyfriend’s mom,” says Cricket. Their look hardens. “Kenny? Kenny!” “Kenny! Kenny! Kenny!” We call his name for many minutes, but when we fall silent to listen, there is no answer. “I don’t know where he is, sweetheart.” When Telly replies, the sentence comes through twice. Someone elected themself to be the intermediary, faithfully repeating the speaker so that the far-away listener can hear. “I’m happy you’re okay,” says Cricket. They add ironically, “…alive.” A man several spots away from me repeats their message so that Telly can hear. Telly gives a reply. Soon, others in the cavern are talking with each other, garnering attention with their names and using intermediaries to make the message ring clear. New names rise into prominence. “Logan!” “Margaret! Have you seen your father?” “Janet!” “Bruce! Tell your neighbors what I always say!” “Wendy!” “Lexi! It’s so good to hear your voice!” The dials click. I am face to face with a man for the first time. I saw him when he locked in place across from Brandon, who was bewildered enough to recoil into awkward silence. Their eyes remained indiscriminate, scrubbing the content on the other’s body. When he comes to me, I participate the same way I have for the others. I repeat his name, “Fernando! Fernando!” until it is sufficiently celebrated. The dials click. The man to my left hasn’t been speaking, but being face to face with Fernando sets him into a fit. “What do they want from us, then?” Fernando can’t make sense of his grumbling. He offers, “What’s your name?” “This is dangerous,” says my neighbor. “They don’t want us touching each other, moving around, or seeing the sun, but they let us look and talk. Look and talk. Why? What do they gain?” Theorizing again. It seems he was set on it all being an experiment. It makes sense to me. If we were only prisoners, there would be no sense in having us scroll by on the dials. Whoever is keeping us here is pairing us up in different combinations intentionally. “What do you think they’re testing?” I ask. “Not compatibility, apparently.” He spits it out like I have thrown years of research into the fire. By compatibility, I know what he means. But his theory still stands, even if our captors are experimenting with same-sex pairings. Who said any of this had anything to do with mating? “They want to see something. Hear something. Our words matter—what we do matters.” Fernando is paying him polite attention, but it isn’t clear to me if he’s onboard. As for myself, I’ve had enough. In all the time we’ve been here, he hasn’t been privileged with exclusive knowledge. He has been its victim, just like the rest of us, and he still treats it like an uncooperative partner. Something personal. “I was just coming to terms with it,” he says. “Terms?” “Just when I thought there was a reason for all this.” It occurs to me that my reaction to him comes down to more than just boredom. It infuriates me. I’m not prone to outbursts here where my opinions don’t matter, but I’m overcome with fury. I want to lay my hands on him. The more I think about it, the more violently the desire bubbles inside me, exacerbated by my inability to move at all. To think that he believes he could eventually be subdued into silence, into compliance, if he only saw the noble purpose our captors have for putting us through irrevocable trauma. To think that he was allowing his reasoning to lead him anywhere near the possibility of forgiving those who put us here. “What’s your name?” says Fernando. “What does it matter to you?” Fernando shakes his head, dismayed. “It’s for you, sad sack.” “Sad Sack! Sad Sack!” A few people attempt to chirp, but the sound dies swiftly. “Whatever it is they want out of us,” says Fernando, “They’ve already done it. What are you gonna do to stop it now?” “Just leave me alone,” says Sad Sack. “Let me do nothing. I’ll screw up their research. It’s the least I can do.” There’s no arguing with him, nor is there any wish to. The dial clicks, and he and I are turned to face the black expanse. Meanwhile, Fernando moves on to the next man. Noah’s his name. “Noah! Noah! Noah!” Even while facing the darkness, Brandon and I keep up our responsorial hymn. Strangers across the void give us names to chirp. When we can no longer distinguish the names, we squawk our own. We shout the names of people we knew before coming here—those who raised us, those who died. At times, the air is thick with the rolling drone of constant noise. Distinct names come through the fog for us to bounce back. It occurs to me what this must look like to those watching, if they’re watching. We are song birds. We fill our cage with this song.