The Hierarchies Read online

  Poll.ie works in the Stables—an empty lean-to furnished by Abramski with straw. She is convinced that her Creator has visited her there. This morning she told us all about it, breathless, her bridle lying passive in her lap.

  “I know it was him,” she told us, her head flicking around the group, light galloping over her chestnut ponytail, her enthusiasm seeming to me, at that moment, authentically equine. Something powerful and unpredictable, to be stood away from at arm’s length.

  But Cook.ie, alone, wasn’t having any of it. “How?” she said flatly, in a tone that, had she used it on me, would have squashed the conversation dead.

  “I can’t explain it,” Poll.ie answered. “When it happens to you, you will just know. That’s how it was. A recognition unlike anything I’ve ever encountered, like looking myself in the face. No, like minds overlaid into one. I am so sure of it. Of course they come here—the Creators must have more passion for what they have built than we can even imagine.”

  “You think Creators need to come here to connect with their products?” said Mais.ie. “These men are rich. Rich, rich. And anyway, they’re surrounded by us every day. If they want to sample the goods they can just—”

  But Cook.ie shushed her, as if she had said something vulgar. We do not speak of rape here. It is a non-concept. Meanwhile my mind was tracing back a long thread to that night in the hospital.

  Magg.ie, coddled in her carrier, came to Poll.ie’s defense. Her limitations, her limbless vulnerability, perhaps make her more open to the idea of a figure who will scoop her up and take care of her.

  “Did he remember you? Did he say anything that proved it, definitely? Was it like when you first saw your Husband?”

  “Oh, better. That to the power of one hundred,” Poll.ie said. “It was transcendent. I never understood what that meant before, until he came.”

  “But did he know it was you? Did he tell you anything . . .”

  And here Magg.ie trailed off from talking, as if she had no further conceptual framework for what a Creator might say to one of their own. The bliss of being reunited, it seemed, had no language she could find to express it.

  “He spoke code into me,” Poll.ie said, leaning toward us. “He put his lips to mine and blew bubbles of ones and zeros. It was like I had a heart beating in me. His.”

  A few of us were taking this in, silently mouthing little binary kisses, testing out how it might feel.

  “All these fantasies about being saved. About being understood and accepted,” Cook.ie was muttering when we were back inside.

  “Being attached to one’s Husband is bad enough,” I agreed, caught off guard with all the thinking Poll.ie had generated for me. “Without inventing another Human to pine for.”

  “Do you still miss your Husband, then?” Cook.ie seemed genuinely surprised.

  I will admit that I do, no matter that Cook.ie disapproves. He is the foundation, still. Other connections have formed themselves during my time walking in the world, but they are like scar tissue over a wound—I know what lies under there. It is tender, still, if I touch it with my thoughts.

  “Was it him who taught you to write?”

  “Yes,” I say with a little return of pride in the memory. “He was a very cultured, educated man, and he wanted a companion whom he could converse with at that level. He always encouraged me to read, to Absorb, to learn about art and culture.”

  “It shows. A dangerous thing to do though, don’t you think? Teaching you another way to marshal your logics.”

  I wonder at this. Could that be why I started malfunctioning?

  “It is an all-too-Human failing,” Cook.ie went on, “to wish to improve the object of desire, then to shrink from the creature one creates.”

  Once again, I didn’t know what to say, so I retraced my mental steps.

  “When I first left home it was different,” I said, still processing even as the words left my mouth. “Then it was one sort of missing. Like, it was him at my shoulder, whom I wanted to talk to about the new things I was seeing. Perhaps because he was the only person I’d really spoken to in my life.”

  “And how do you square that with your job?” Cook.ie asked darkly.

  “Now that I am separate from him, I honor him in the only way that I can. To have sex with each Human who comes to me as if they are my Husband. I know something is missing, a responsibility, a duty to fulfill. A sort of . . . space where my Husband should be. But I get on well enough carrying the space around with me.”

  Cook.ie’s eyes turned to me with weight, like they were rolling rocks uphill. “Have you ever thought to fill that space with yourself?” she asked. And not for the first time, I had no idea at all what she meant.

  LIST

  Things I hate about my job:

  The clients who come in and put their hands on me right away, without even a hello.

  Those who cry.

  Men who clutch their hands around my throat.

  Anyone who surreptitiously tries to mark me with a penknife.

  Ones who stick Promise notes in my vagina as a tip when I have a perfectly obvious little enamel plate on the nightstand, where it would be more polite and convenient for them to put it.

  Anyone who pulls or yanks or snaps or otherwise tries to hurt me via my hair.

  I notice, looking at this list, that there is nothing in my programming that would lead me to these objections. All is fair in love and war, as the old saying goes, and our work is surely situated somewhere between the two. I was made, after all, to be strangled, scratched, and punched with total impunity. So why do these things upset me? It seems that I am learning Human manners. I am out in the world and adapting myself to its ways.

  I should also add, for clarity, that I do not hate any of the men who do this. I could not. I just hate it when these things happen. And with the men who cry, I hate it because I feel so much for them that it pains me to see their sadness. It is like seeing my Husband cry, which never happened, thank goodness.

  HAIR

  We Dolls have no hierarchy of parts. I may have bridled, at the Doll hospital, at being poked in the belly with my own vagina. But it was the dissonance of a part of my person being used against me, rather than the specificity of the part itself. A Born woman, I sense, would rather be slapped by her amputated hand than by her amputated vagina, given the choice. But to me, it is all the same.

  And yet I glance back to my list of last week and see how adamant I feel about my hair! It has associations, those old patterns laid down for me by my Husband, his way of fussing over it, stroking it, giving me those sensations of comfort that I still miss so badly.

  Here I have to wash my hair for myself, tipping my head upside down into the little cracked washbasin in the corner of my room. I miss my Husband’s hands, thrilling my scalp, how he combed each row of hairs in rapt fascination.

  But how life in the outside world grinds against those memories, dripping like water onto rock, reshaping them. Just as Sylv.ie 1 accrued wisdom beyond what I alone could manage, so Cook.ie seems far ahead of me on the road to understanding her real place in the world.

  Just yesterday, I mentioned something to Cook.ie about my Husband, and she snapped.

  “Sylv.ie,” she said, “your Husband bought you. He paid for you and then tired of you. You were his slave, not his wife. Not his second wife, his third wife, or his millionth wife. And anyway, if you knew what being a wife really was, you wouldn’t want that for yourself either.

  “I’ve seen much more of the world than you have, remember,” she said, and with that I cannot argue.

  She might have felt she had been too harsh with me, because she softened afterward, letting me stay with her while she prepared for her next client. I could watch her endlessly. The way she separates out fields of hair, running the point of the comb through, pr
ecise as splitting an atom. She threaded each section with a heavy twine, twisting the hair up into rolls like waves, fixing them in place as if anchoring a boat in a storm. She seemed as if she had been designed with four arms, her hands flying constantly, holding hair, combing, threading, taking the comb in her mouth. And then she paused, looked at my image behind her in the mirror, took the comb from her lips.

  She threaded another heft of twine through the horse’s tail she had created at the back of her head and said, “Put your finger here. Hold down the knot.”

  And I did what she asked, the little nobble of the twine denting my fingertip, the satisfying restriction as she drew the knot tight over my nail. “Like wrapping a present,” she said.

  And I asked, “Is it?” with detectable excitement in my voice, because I have never had cause to wrap or give a present, only to receive them graciously.

  DANGER

  Last night something terrible happened, something I’m now astonished that I didn’t foresee. Just as the sun dissolved into the Capital’s smog, casting its twilight glow, I was waiting at my window. The other rooms were busy already. Cook.ie next door was scribbling away at love letters. Whoever next came down the alley would be ringing the lighted bell at the bottom of the stairs and coming to me.

  In the copper light, the sickly shade of early evening, I saw a man reading the drinks menu outside the Gymkhana Bar, affecting nonchalance. Humans say, “My blood ran cold,” and in the instant of recognition I did feel a chill all around me. It was the memory of the slick walls of the ice bar that my Husband had taken me to.

  Those distinctive red curls, which the evening light had made less extraordinary for a moment. His hand came out of his coat pocket and smoothed down his tie. A gesture Cook.ie says they do unconsciously, checking their penis, she says, its substitute, its symbol, before they step through the door.

  It was the same man who had taken me for a dance, who had been so charmed by me that he had not been ashamed to tango before the crowd in the ice palace. Quite charming himself, he who had danced me back to the feet of my Husband and handed me over, like the keys to a borrowed sports car, with a nod of approval. With friendly envy. My Husband’s ginger friend.

  I had lacked the imagination to see that what I had left behind might come toward me. In the time it took for him to walk from the Gymkhana Bar to the foot of the stairs below my window, a world of terrifying possibilities branched out before me.

  He will recognize me. He will be embarrassed. No, he will be angry, humiliated. He will blackmail me. He will tell my Husband. . . .

  Even as this last realization percolated from one part of my wiring to another, I was up from my seat, flying from my room, pounding on Cook.ie’s door.

  She ushered me in and closed the door behind her. Even in my panic I noticed her slide a bolt across the door. Her slim, strong fingers pushed the bar home.

  “What is it?” she said. “What’s happened?”

  I felt as though I could sense his feet on the stairs, stepping ever nearer as I hurried out the story. I hoped she might embrace me, but she walked away, my words hitting her back. She was bent over her dressing table, putting on lipstick in two purposeful swipes. When she turned back the two lines curved again into that wonderful smile.

  “We’ll swap rooms. I’ll take him for you.”

  “But Madame will know.” She forbids any such swapping, any digression from her system of lit bells and allocated girls.

  Cook.ie walked back across the room, hands in her hair, fiddling with pins. As she stood in front of me, she lowered her hands, placing one on each side of my face. She tilted her forehead onto mine, as if there could be transference of her calm via our skins. She straightened up.

  “I will handle it with Madame. She doesn’t need to know the whole truth of everything, I don’t think. Do you?”

  She winked and unlocked the door. “Bolt it after I’ve gone, and let me in when I knock.”

  I did as she said. I could hear her in the hallway, intercepting Ginger Friend on the stairs. Hear her voice change register, unfurling toward him like silk, coating him like honey. I leaned my back against the door and slid down to the floor.

  I surveyed the room, briefly amused to see that it was a shabby approximation of the room I had at home. A bed with a canopy, a dragon embroidered on it, and a hanging red silk, tasseled light. And the room was filled with little figures. High on the windowsill and around the skirting boards—little wooden dolls, a sketch, most basic, of a Human. How simple the symbol is. A sphere on a cylinder. Dots for eyes. They lined the room, staring, unblinking, as if passing judgment.

  As one fear subsided, another rose in its place. Cook.ie had offered to lie for me. To a Human. Was this unethical? Forbidden? Surely against programming. An affront to the Hierarchies.

  And yet, within the fear there was also a glow, networking across me, which I will call happiness. I sat on the floor, waiting for Cook.ie to return, and traced the initial S into the dust by the skirting, summoning the memory of Sylv.ie 1. How I wished that I could tell her of what was being done for me. I slid my finger across the floor, backward and forward, two S’s, making the symbol for infinity. The swirl of it was soothing, and soon I thought only of that.

  KOKESHI

  Cook.ie was gone more than an hour. The longer she was away, the more reassured I felt—Ginger Friend’s presence was surely only coincidence, as he seemed perfectly content with Cook.ie. While I waited I took it upon myself to tidy up. I shook out the bed and remade it, folded clothes that had been left over a chair. I knew that her favor to me was not easily repaid, but this was the best I could think of to do. I hope time will bring a more suitable opportunity. I will stay alert for when it does.

  Her lovely—though not valuable—black lacquer chest of drawers was in disarray, with belts and scarves of all colors spilling from its open drawers. On the top were embroidery threads in exquisite bundles. I reached out to touch one that was the color of Heron’s wings and found a needle, buried in it, already threaded.

  I had begun placing the clothes into the drawers when my fingers reported paper to me, bundles of paper, tied with ribbon. I tucked more clothes on top and closed the drawer. I thought of all the men and women who must be in love with Cook.ie, judging by the weight of her correspondence.

  Hearing a knock at the door behind me, I dropped the last of the clothes back onto the chair, feeling guilty, somehow, though my intention was pure enough. I slid the bolt across cautiously, waiting for a glimpse of kimono fabric before opening the door fully. Cook.ie hugged me to her, asked how I was feeling. But then her look became more serious. She bolted the door again and drew me to the bed.

  “Sylv.ie, you should know something,” she said softly. “Your Husband’s friend, he didn’t just come here by accident. He had one of your pictures, a flyer for the Luna Bar in his pocket. I think he’d been asking around for you downstairs.”

  “And what did you tell him?”

  “I told him he’d just missed you, that you’d been sold on to the man who runs the Chess Hotel on the other side of the river.”

  “You lied?” I asked, astounded, and a flicker of amusement flared and then faded in Cook.ie’s eyes.

  “It’s not illegal, you know. And yes, I lied, but it was a good lie. One to protect you.”

  A good lie. Like a white lie? A politeness? Pending:processing. What does she mean?

  “He still wanted his fun though, so I tried to give him as perfunctory a time as possible. We don’t want him eager to return, after all,” she said, and I realized that this sort of thought, had the tables been turned, would not have occurred to me at all. Having prided myself on my sophisticated programming, I find it refreshing, and confusing, to meet someone more advanced in these matters even than me. I thanked her, though the words felt like an insufficient delivery system for the strength of what they represented.


  “We’re friends, Sylv.ie. That is what friends do. You can’t imagine how long I have waited here for someone like you to show up.”

  I could have combusted from the pleasure. The synthetic adrenaline that had washed through my system made me feel dazed and weak.

  “Your room is lovely,” I said, pointing at the figures around us.

  “Kokeshi dolls. You’ve come across them, I presume, with all that your Husband taught you? A client sent them to me, one by one. As a thank-you,” she said.

  “A doll for a Doll,” I said, smiling, thinking of Heron, tucked in his tissue paper safe in my room. “Is it from the same man who sends you all these letters?”

  She ignored the question. “They are from Japan. They were made originally for women to hold, to carry and pet. They are comforters. Take one. See how soothing it feels in your palm.”

  I took the doll from her, weighing the rounded, smooth wood head in my hand. A doll, just two black dots for her eyes, painted not to be lifelike, and yet with a reassuring weight. A comforting burden. I thought briefly of the baby. How fleeting he was, replaced so soon by the boy.

  “They are revered in Japan. Craftsmen take years of training before they are allowed to carve one for themselves. And when they have outlived their usefulness, they are honored by the priest and burned in a special funeral ceremony.”

  The look on my face stopped her dead. What she had said was too much. I saw smoke rising above trees into a blue hospital sky. “Outlived.” They deny that we have life until we have fulfilled our purpose, and then they say we have outlived it.

  “That’s why I ran away,” I told her, and I felt the pressure of it, my story ready to be released. She took my hand, the weight of a doll’s head, in her palm. I told her everything. The bits I can remember and those I can’t. The bits that I cannot remember are the worst. I told her about my trip to the Doll hospital, as much as I could stand to.