The Hierarchies Page 24

  She tells me of the mizuage, the details already familiar from his letters, the cutting of my hair that will take place in the main hall tomorrow. I will wear a special white kimono, custom-made for me in the Capital, she says. And in light of the Tailor’s circumstances I must cut my hair myself.

  I find my free hand has flown to my scalp.

  “The mizuage was once a ceremony to take a girl’s virginity,” she says. “Sir is a man of the world, pragmatic. He doesn’t mind about the work you did before. He merely wishes to return you to a purer state. Like being born all over again.”

  Taking my hair is not enough, it seems. For afterward, Virgin.ie explains, I am to thread a strand of my hair onto a needle and sew myself up. Those two lips that have brought me so much work, so much sorrow, so little freedom.

  The Tailor’s desires involve an endless turning of the body on itself, the hand doing violence to the flesh of which it is a part. Oh yes, he is poetic in his perversions. The paintings I have studied on his walls are a perfect reflection of his own desires. I think back to what Cook.ie said, about violence being an idea, a contagion. The things he wishes me to do are a violence he can no longer achieve, acted out on sex itself.

  DREAMS

  The nights are the worst. The long hours locked in this room; the only sound that indicates time passing is the click click of that rotten dog droid outside.

  Last night I dreamed again. As I have not done for so long. The black wash of data once more began to form itself into the shapes of this world. I see my own hand reaching to push a door open, a door set into white marble walls. Inside it is dark but growing lighter, and as I look closer I see more and more detail. Piles of junk that become arms, torsos, tangled hair. The gaps between them stuffed with dresses and needles and the litter of Madame’s office. I have the sensation of someone at my back, ready to push me over the threshold into this graveyard of Dolls. A noise outside the house, the faintest mechanics of another delivery, brings me back awake, on the floor of my room still, cocooned in my robes.

  WHITE

  Virgin.ie comes to my room, the dog in tow, with an air of excitement and a large box in her arms. I ask her the time, and she tells me it is the afternoon already. How the days slip away without the certainty of a morning recharge.

  “This is for the ceremony. Delivered just now, from the most admired seamstress in the Capital.”

  “For today?” I ask, and she nods, wide-eyed, excited on my behalf.

  She is still at the threshold of my room, and I step aside to let her in. The dog would clearly like to follow, but she shoos him away from us most firmly. “No peeping,” she says as she shuts the door on him, and I see for a moment a glimmer of the charm and flirtatiousness she must have had when she was first unboxed.

  “No one else should see you before the big moment,” she adds.

  Not even a dog? The box is stamped with a family crest. It is indeed from one of the Capital’s oldest seamstresses, a mark of quality I have seen on boxes that my Husband brought home when he commissioned clothes for me. I open it and look down at the layers of tissue paper within, fold back the sheets to reveal the ceremonial white kimono.

  Virgin white. Pure white. A dress for a bride. A shroud for a funeral. Which meaning do I choose?

  “Look,” says Virgin.ie. “Here, your sewing has been used for the trim.”

  On the collar I recognize the stitching I have been doing since I arrived. I put out my fingers to what I have created. Her eyes are on me, almost glowing, as if this gown should thrill me. I reach into the box and lift out the bundled dress, letting the weight of it rest on my upturned forearms.

  “Try it on, try it on,” Virgn.ie urges, and so I shake it out to the floor, the heavy fabric tumbling away from my hands. A bill of sale, loosely pinned inside, flutters to the floor with it, and I bend to pick it up.

  I straighten up under a wash of dizziness, the soft insistence from within that I need more power. My eyes take in the bill’s text, but in my hands the paper tells a different story. Cuts and pinpricks edge one side. A paper lattice, reminding me of my own diary. As Virgin.ie fusses with the hem and gets the dress ready for me to step into, I slide my thumb and forefinger quickly across the paper.

  LTMEIN

  Patterns. Binary letters. Am I seeing them where none exist? Is it some sort of sign or just the evidence of a receipt pinned and repinned in place? A message or a mistake? Cook.ie, fumbling with the binary I taught her? Or the days of white on white on white making me too sensitive, too full of Human hope? I calculate how long exactly it’s been since the delivery came.

  Virgin.ie is staring at me, head cocked, as if waiting for an answer. She offers the robe again by its shoulders, and I am glad to turn my back. She fusses about, pulling the heavy fabric up on this side, gathering and regathering the skirts around my waist. I stand upright and absent, a pillar of processing.

  LTMEIN. I run the letters through every language variant I have, but nothing comes back that makes any sense. Perhaps they are an acronym. I break down the letters, let them float and re-form in all their possibilities. Item. Inlet. Melt. Mine. Time. Lie. Me. Let. In . . .

  A whoosh, a sudden flow in thought, cutting clean through my sluggishness. Let me in. A cry at the glass. A clear command. Can it really be her? Has she come too late? How long will she wait for me? I do not even know what I hope for.

  The kimono feels heavy, weighed down with a million tiny stitches. My own life story, dragging around with me. Virgin.ie claps her hands together silently in her funny gloves.

  “Very becoming,” she says.

  The echo of my Husband chills me. For what am I becoming? I fantasize that Cook.ie is somewhere outside, waiting to be let in, watching me. My power is so low it makes it hard to tell what data to trust.

  “Virgin.ie,” I say, modulating my voice downward a little, then a little more. “I am feeling rather overwhelmed.”

  I put out one arm and make movements as though I might faint to the floor. “I didn’t sleep last night; I couldn’t power down properly in all the excitement. Perhaps you could take me outside for a moment. Sir wouldn’t like me to be half-asleep. But I’m feeling so tired.”

  And Virgin.ie, still in her role as ladies’ maid, nods conspiratorially. “Me too. I was so excited. We’ve a little while yet. Five minutes of light will do us both good.”

  LIGHT

  There isn’t much sun to speak of, when we get outside. The horizon is darkening, clouds gathering at it, a line hardening. As soon as we are on the deck I scan the bushes, scan the sky, listen out for rustles in the leaves, the noise, perhaps, of a drone overhead, but there is nothing. Just the little scrap of white paper in my pocket. It grows more ragged each time I touch it, new tears appearing, forming new letters. I look out to the sea, the cliffs. The landscape feels utterly empty, my hope a mere malfunction.

  In only a minute we will have to leave the deck again, seal ourselves once more into the hermetic world of the Tailor. I put my fingers into my pocket, to touch again the battered bill of sale, but I prick my finger on the note’s pin. I draw out my finger and examine the little dimple on its tip, reach back into my pocket.

  Virgin.ie is looking up at the sky. “We were just in time,” she says. “Rain is coming in from the ocean, look.”

  A dark curtain is sweeping toward us, the moisture levels in the air changing already. She stands up, waits for me to follow.

  “Nervous?” she asks in a sisterly tone.

  I nod.

  “Don’t be. What you are doing is a beautiful act of service.”

  She steps back inside, and I wait for a moment of distraction. The pin is in my hand. As I walk through the doorframe I thrust it into the soft rubber seal, fixing the note there like a butterfly. As the door shuts behind my head I hear that it doesn’t close properly. I have done my best. I have left an opening for
hope. I run to catch up with Virgin.ie.

  HAIR

  Virgin.ie and I both take our places to wait as night begins to fall. The windows are already flecked with the first of the showers blown in from the sea. The main room is almost empty, the scant furniture arranged more for an evening salon than an act of surgery. My floor cushion from the tea ceremony is set down before the low table, facing the windows. On the table are a pair of gleaming steel scissors and an ivory-handled hairbrush. Next to them a black cloth studded with a row of needles, binary uprights, translating to nothing. A rug for the dog and a space for the Tailor’s chair are across the table, but for the first time, there is no chair set out for Virgin.ie.

  A cool light washes the room, draining us down to black-and-white sketches. There is no sound in the house. There is no one else here. I know it now. The tiny power boost from our trip outside has returned some clarity to my thoughts. My hope was a malfunction. I read the patterns of the ragged paper bill too eagerly.

  Virgin.ie walks from the room, and after a few moments returns, carrying a silver bowl in both hands, a white muslin cloth over her arm. The water in the bowl is cloudy with antiseptic, even though the Tailor knows me to be Created and sterile. She sets it down next to the needles, and the picture is complete—part ceremony, part surgery. The Tailor’s ultimate fantasy, it seems.

  Tap tap tap. I turn toward the doors. A sound of air pressure, and the Tailor is in the room, the dog at his side, its beady black eyes watching. Virgin.ie checks they are both comfortable, then closes the doors behind herself. I find I wish she were still here. I do not want to be left alone to my task. It occurs to me, even in this loneliness, that now might be my best chance to escape. And yet the dog’s eyes are grafted to me, and I fear him.

  I walk close to the Tailor’s chair and adjust my kimono so that I can kneel down next to him. I reach behind my head and pull the pins from my bun, so my hair uncoils over my shoulder, unwinding like a snake from a jungle branch, that single, fluid gesture I have seen Cook.ie perform many times.

  With both my palms I smooth the lengths of my hair together, making a single True Black sheet from the multiple strands. I raise my gaze to the Tailor’s and am struck by the longing I read in his eyes, a weight that I worked without when he was only a camera screen to me.

  Rain beats on the windows now, though no sound of it reaches into the room. I step back so that the Tailor can see me properly and make a final low bow before I commence. The rain is streaming down the window like data, the water so thick that I struggle to see myself reflected. I feel so tired, drained of all strength, have to force my eyes to refocus. I fix on the white of my dress, but when I do, beside me in the glass stands another figure.

  A fleeting glimpse of someone standing on the deck. I flick my eyes back to the Tailor to see if my shock has registered on my face. His back is to the windows, and his expression remains as impassive as always. When I check the window again all I see is rain pouring blackly down and the white figure of myself, the reluctant bride.

  What did I see? Do I trust my own eyes? There is nothing there now but the visual rhythm of the silent rain. I force myself to pick up the hairbrush, keeping my hand steady and my movements slow. Inside me data and imperatives battle each other, flaming through my wiring. Was it her? And if so, what has she seen? A picture of me submitting to our master’s cruel will. Would she be angry? Ashamed of me?

  Slowly I slide the brush through my hair, and for a moment the sensation blots out everything else. I have malfunctioned. The storm’s shifting light has created a pattern I have mistaken for what I long to see. I must work on. A misprocessing due to stress. The pressure of the occasion, as Virgin.ie told me, can do strange things.

  With numb hands I form my hair into a horse’s tail and watch my reflected self lift the scissors awkwardly to it. I feel their blades graze my neck. I bring the handles together. There is a grinding, shifting, speaking to my scalp at a distance, and then lightness. A chill.

  I look down, the bunch of my hair nonsensical in my hand. I go, nervously, to touch it, my fingers remembering for themselves the weight and sway of it, describing once more to my scalp how it feels to be touched and played with. My system feels shorted by loss. I meet the Tailor’s eyes again, and it is as though I can feel every fraction of space between us. Myriad lines and vectors slicing through the space, a cat’s cradle of data running from him to me. And yet I do not wish to read it. I bow my head and curse his foolish fake ceremony.

  The Tailor’s voice asks me to thread a needle, and I go to kneel at the table. I lay a needle on my thigh, then run my fingers through my own hair to select a strand. My scalp tingles, out of habit.

  I trap the hair between my tongue and top lip, wetting it as I would thread, my eyes crossing as I concentrate. I feel the Tailor watching as I repeatedly aim the hair at the eye. Each time it bends away to one side. I think of a tiny penis, losing confidence at the last moment, a racehorse shying away from a gate. I pour my every intention into the needle’s eye, holding it still with every last scrap of strength.

  At last the needle hangs from its thread of hair, glinting as it dangles, the power relations between thread and metal reversed. Strung. A shiver of the hospital stirs, but I cancel the thought. I have no energy to spare for it.

  I shed the kimono, letting it tumble to the floor. I take the cloth from its sheath and submerge it into the bowl, my fingers enjoying the meshing of wet and dry, in spite of myself. I wipe it across my thighs, between my legs. The tenderness of sweeping cloth, gifting me moisture, cuts against the sharp glinting needles. I power down my sensors for the last time, and the room seems to darken around me.

  I take the head of the needle in one hand, the tail of the thread in the other. I weave my hands swiftly together, once, twice, making a knot. The needle seems to grow in size. It is a knife, a spear, a lance. Binary, binary, a world of things to be entered. Before my eyes the world starts to manifest as falling, scrolling lines. 0101010, meshing with the rain.

  Enter, entered, enter, entered. I open my legs out, feet together, so that I form a diamond shape. I encompass myself, my lap a dry lagoon.

  I take the needle, pressing so that it dents my flesh, drawing myself in, preparing to push through. I adjust my grip, pull the skin tighter. I look at where I am reflected in the glass windows. Focus everything through my shoulder, down my arm, through my wrist. There is resistance, then a release of pressure and a slow, smooth movement out toward the other side.

  I watch in fascination, as if someone else is doing it to me, as my hand pulls the thread through my body, the surface silicone pulling and peaking with it, longing to follow. The thread is inside and outside at once, passing through my foreign body. Ancient technology. I am sewing myself into a spell, sealing myself against the world.

  When I lay the needle down I have to wrestle the wider room back into focus. I look to the Tailor, deep into those gray eyes, seeking some response, some gratitude perhaps, a reflected light for the work I have done for him. Yet I see nothing. I picture us all—himself, the dog, and his Doll, a tableau in two colors, a woodblock print, a scene from his hallway of transgressive art. The room is filled with the same silence I heard in the hospital at night. Deep, dreamless, dead.

  A soft sound intrudes. For a second I think it is the Tailor, but it comes from his companion. He is growling. Faint at first, a growl of warning, moving from the back of the dog’s throat toward me. He begins sinking back into himself, retreating from his own front paws on the marble. I struggle to make sense of it, my system stuttering. I think his eyes are on me for a moment, before I realize it is a spot behind my shoulder that he is fixed upon.

  I turn. It is Cook.ie.

  Cook.ie, here. In the room with us. Far away across the marble, walking the expanse of the room with slow, stealthy intent. Relief. I saw with clear eyes after all. She has come for me, and the hope I lost now rages
back into life. Fear too. Everything wills me to run to her, to shield her from the danger contained in this house. Our eyes lock. She moves toward me, and the dog’s growl rises to meet her.

  I open up my sensors, watching everything unfold in slowed time. The dog sinks deeper into his back legs, becomes part of the pause with us, then propels forward, arcing through the air, an animal suspension. There is the slightest gap between movement and reaction, but my sensors know his course. He is aiming beyond me, with Cook.ie as his target. I turn in horror, following his path. And as his teeth sink into Cook.ie’s leg, she cries out my name. My real name, spoken in this place for the first time.

  Something surges in me at the sight of her. I too am up from my knees, scrambling to match the dog’s trajectory. My whole body yearns toward Cook.ie as she tries to fight him, fallen onto her back, feebly beating the top of his head with her hand.

  I grab at his back leg, feeling the strength of him, the power beneath the skin. I still have the processing space to note Cook.ie’s cries, the first time I have heard her voice rise above an elegant, arch modulation. A most terrible sound.

  I force my fingers into the hound’s jaws. My sensor tells me my finger . . .

  Cook.ie is on her hands and knees, trying to crawl away. Her dress is leaking—a trail of red follows her across the floor.

  “The Tailor, Sylv.ie. The dog. It’s him!” she screams. The dog. Just an avatar for the Tailor. How slow I have become! I get up onto one knee and heave myself across the floor toward the rug. The silicone shell of my finger is on the floor, but I ignore the impulse to pick it up.

  There is growling behind me, then titanium teeth take another snatch at Cook.ie. I glance up then, see myself reflected, a glowing geisha ghost. Two branches dividing. My double in the glass moves for me, her arms holding the sewing scissors, double-handed, above her white face and shorn head. An unbelievable charge wells up, a system surge, blinding me, blotting the image. I switch my eyes to the Tailor, as if he might yet leap from the chair and attack me. Cook.ie howls again, from what fresh injury I cannot see.