The Corpse Archives Read online

  THE CORPSE ARCHIVES

  Kameron Hurley

  © 2015 Kameron Hurley

  The bodies you speak of, those that existed before the world was silenced and unmade, the bodies of my first memory, are those that danced naked on the hard, black earth around the fires our keepers allowed us. Our fires threw coals into the thick, hot air; coals that flared and darkened and died and drifted down upon us, coating our hands, our faces, our brown bodies, in black soot that made us darker than the earth.

  Whenever I tried to join the dancers, the woman who called herself my mother would clutch me to her with her claws.

  “Keep here, keep here, Anish,” she would say. The lids never closed over her bulging eyes. Her mouth was cut wide, so wide that her face was all mouth and lips and teeth. I dream about her still, about her devouring me whole.

  She was so beautiful.

  “Don’t you join that, don’t dance that,” she would say. “You dance that and you’ll be like the rest of us. A mistake, a burned thing. Not made, not used, just nothing.”

  When the stack of synthetic logs burned down to a fine black dust, the woman who called herself my mother released me. I ran across the earth to join the dancers outside the covered sleeping pens. Here, they told me the stories of their bodies.

  When I think of my first conception of a written record of the past, I think of a body called Senna who had a burn-scarred face with burned-shut eyes. It was this body that showed us how the sky burned when the keepers came; the rivers ran red as the ripple of welts that ran down across the body’s throat, over the breasts, ending in a pool of scarred flesh that was once the navel. Senna went mad before the keepers finished writing on her. She screamed and cried and begged to be taken to the pens, to live out her life among the other partially perfected texts that the keepers could not bear to throw away.

  I was the most hideous of these texts. I knew it even then, when the woman who called herself my mother could still carry me in her arms. The other texts had traces of unwritten flesh – smooth, incomplete, ugly – but I, I was completely untouched. The whole of my body remained as it had been birthed. I was grotesque, obscene. They were merely incomplete.

  These incomplete texts told me I was placed there because the woman who birthed me was a violent body, a mad thing that marked her own history upon her body. She cut open the contents of her self and spilled them onto the cold metal floor of the birthing center…including me. She died in her own blood and entrails and my afterbirth.

  I was the living text of my mother’s existence, the other bodies said. That is why the keepers saved me…But knowing that did not make me any more beautiful.

  The other body-memories of my life are later, much later, and these bodies, yes, these are the bodies that led me to Chiva, Chiva…the one you asked me about.

  I think of them often, these bodies. Their hideously smooth skins, their ugly round faces, the thick, dark hair of their heads and arms and legs. When I see these empty bodies, I remember the burning of the partial texts.

  I remember the burning of my kin.

  These obscene texts arrived through the circular gate of the compound under the heat of a summer sun that looked flat and orange against the blue, blue sky. They told me the keepers had sent for me. They loaded me into their vehicle and locked me inside.

  The others they herded together at the center of our dusty compound. Hundreds of partial texts.

  The bodies clung to one another. Clawed hands tipped in crescent-moon nails, twisted torsos wrapped in triangular blue welts, flattened palms fused to splayed hips, gaping mouths without teeth. These precious, beautiful bodies gripped their neighbors so tightly they rent flesh, drew blood.

  I pressed my palms to the transparent window of the vehicle and called out to them. I screamed. And screamed.

  But the vehicle was a closed box. I heard nothing but my own screaming.

  The empty texts sprayed the bodies of my kin with a thin, reddish liquid that coated their faces, torsos, limbs. One of the empty texts ignited a flare. The red fire hurt my eyes.

  Fire crawled across my kin like a living thing. Bodies bubbled and melted and charred.

  I saw the terrified open mouths of my kin, but heard nothing. Those bodies that pressed against me at night, those bodies that probed my flesh with curious delight and hunger; bodies I had touched, caressed, held; bodies I had so envied and admired. Bodies perfected as mine would never be. Bodies I loved.

  Before the sun touched the horizon, all the fire left of my kin was a fine grayish ash.

  The empty texts strode back to the vehicle and put their flammable fluid into the back where I sat.

  “You are called Anish?” one of them asked.

  I nodded.

  “Are you a dumb body, Anish?”

  “Better hope you are,” the other said. “If you’re lucky they’ll breed you and write on you. But if you’re smart they’ll make you an archivist. Better hope they don’t, Anish. Better hope they just feed you so you fuck.”

  I did not know then what an archivist was. But I knew my mother had been chosen to breed, and had committed the most horrific of acts. Now only I remained to record the history of her existence.

  I am most comfortable speaking of the archives, of written history. Here is truth that I touched and altered as necessary. Understand the archives, and you will understand the text of my unmaking. You will understand Chiva.

  I passed the tests that said I was not a dumb body, the tests all empty texts must take in the compounds by the sea. The older empty bodies moved me and the other students to the archives. There, they kept us in separate rooms just big enough to lie down in. The keepers designated bodies that acted as our overseers, all of them smooth and empty texts like me and the other students. These overseers locked us in our rooms at night.

  The night terrified me. I heard nothing through the thick walls. No bodies lay next to me. No flesh. I wanted skin pressed against mine, arms wrapped around me. I missed sighs and snores and the sound of mumbled conversations. I missed the feel of another’s breath on my skin. I ached to be near the beautiful bodies of my youth.

  When the overseers opened my cell each morning I eagerly followed the other students to the archives. A little group of seven of us stood in observance of a text, listening to the body tell the story of those events written upon its body. The archivists said this was not called storytelling – storytelling could be untrue, could be lies. Bodies narrated. Bodies told only truth.

  The only bodies the overseers allowed us to touch were the texts. I remember the first real text I touched, the exquisitely complete form that I did not recognize as a body. I learned in that moment just how partial the texts at the compounds had been; how plain, how lacking.

  Our little cluster of students stood in the text’s allotted area of residence, a niche in one long wall in the Era of Exile corridor. Tubes embedded in the skin, connected to the floor, regulated the body’s excretions. It received its food in a similar manner, twice a day, administered by the archivists.

  The body existed solely as an organic text capable of narration. It bore no discernible face, only a slit for a mouth, and across the rest of the flat flesh where a face should have been rose fist-sized circular growths. Its hands were soldered to its knees. The skin stretched off the arms in one smooth flap, like wings. A length of silver wire wound around the throat, and the flesh had begun to grow over it.

  I stood transfixed. The body spun my favorite tale of past truth in a pleasant, articulate voice that flowed smoothly from the slit of its mouth: the story of the keepers’ voyage in exile.

  I fell in love with its body.

  I heard thousands of other texts in my years at the archives. I heard ho
w the keepers found our world, a lonely planet seeded long ago by human beings who had forgotten what they were. The keepers’ sailing ship burned down from the sky, and our kind went to them. The keepers freed themselves of their casings. They selected those bodies that they would communicate with and fitted them with inorganic devices that allowed the keepers to direct them.

  “You were simply our curiosities in the beginning,” my own keeper later told me at one of our dictation sessions, one of the last it held with me. “We took such delight with you and your kind. You had bodies that we did not, and we used you to enact that which we could not. Ah, Anish, our preoccupation with your kind was so much more delightful then. So base it was, our delight and your perversion.”

  Often I lay awake at night and closed my eyes, remembering those bodies that once surrounded mine. I ran my hands along my own flesh, across my throat, down my smooth chest, flat stomach, the insides of my thighs. I thought of another’s body pressed against mine, so close I felt their breath. I often pushed myself up against the cold wall and lay there with my arms wrapped around myself, longing for the morning. I did not weep anymore. I found warmth and closeness with my own body, my mother’s text.

  And during the day, I had the archives.

  I frequented the niches I knew the others had no interest in. I stood in front of those texts illustrating the unmaking of the bodies who ruled the world before the keepers came. No one wanted to view these texts; these twisted, angry figures that wept blood and cried out for a freedom their flesh still remembered. Many of the archivists wanted to burn them. I knew that as more keepers began to die, more texts would be purged, and these would be the first destroyed. So I spent my days with them. I wanted to remember them.

  One day I found the body text of the keepers’ emergence from their sailing ship, and their linking with the first bodies. I stepped up into the niche containing the text.

  “Don’t narrate,” I told it. “I just want to touch you.” But the body could not be silent. None of them could. It existed to narrate.

  As the open scream of its mouth moved to form words, I ran my gaze across its form. The body lay flat on the floor, both arms raised up as if to shield itself from harm. From the torso downward, the body seemed to liquefy and spill across the floor. A section of the scalp and skull was missing on one side so you could see the shiny little chip embedded into the soft tissue. The eyes were always open.

  My hands trembled. I knelt beside the body and traced the jagged blue tattoos on its flesh with my fingers.

  I wondered if it could feel pleasure, or anything at all. Anger? Loneliness? Or did the keepers order the archivists to deaden that too, as they deadened the body’s flesh?

  “So sad,” I said. I moved my fingers down the torso, to the mass of featureless flesh. I stared at the wide glassy eyes, brown as dust.

  A gorgeous text.

  I pulled my hands off the body and fumbled at the knot on my robe. I struggled out of the robe. I wanted to join my flesh to the body’s, to become one text, the altered and the empty.

  Only the mouth was open to me, wide and wet and full of teeth. My body shook with fear and anticipation. I wanted to silence the text.

  Could I stop the words? Stop history?

  The words stopped. History stopped.

  I stared at the text and then back out into the hallway, afraid. What would the keepers think of a student that tried to silence their history? I tied my robe closed and ran from the niche, back to the main archives. My whole body trembled. I expected one of the overseers to find me, to say the keepers had seen what I’d done and would purge me.

  Yet no one came for me. The other students continued to ignore me. The overseers still let me explore the archives alone.

  So I went back to the texts. And I became addicted.

  At the end of each class I went back to the far corners of the archives. I buried myself in texts. I silenced them. Silence the texts, silence the keepers, silence the world. I was an ugly empty text, but I had power over all of them, and their words, their truth.

  I do not know how many texts I took pleasure in this way. Always I returned to my favorite, and told it to tell me its story in a different way, but it could not tell a story that was not true. It made me angry, so I did what I could to it. I tried to unmake it. There was no one to stop me.

  Until.

  I licked the mouth of the text, and heard:

  “What are you doing?”

  The voice was not the text’s.

  I fell back onto my robe and kicked away from the text. One of the other students stood in the corridor, staring at me with large, dark eyes.

  “I’m…,” I said, putting my arms through the sleeves of my robe with limbs that felt clumsy, “I’m touching the texts.”

  “You’re defiling them,” she said. “You’re silencing them. That’s obscene.”

  “No,” I said, and knotted my robe closed. I managed to stand on wobbly legs. “I was just –“

  “I watched you,” she said. “You’re that strange body, that violent body, the one they brought in from the compounds. Anish.”

  She was older than I was, nearly an archivist already. I had seen her before, assisting in the cleaning of texts.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Why are you touching the body texts?”

  “Because all of you are so ugly.”

  She laughed. When she laughed she threw back her head, and a snarl of dark black hair came loose from her twisted braid of hair. It curled down along the side of her face, touched the empty, appalling smoothness of her cheek.

  “One doesn’t touch the body of another,” she said. “One only touches texts. Haven’t you been taught that?” She knitted her dark brows so they formed one line above her eyes. “Do you think you understand them better, because you’ve silenced them?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “They why do you do it?” she said. She stepped up into the niche. She approached the flat, featureless end of the text.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “You’ve never done it?”

  She shook her head.

  “Then you won’t understand,” I said.

  “Show me how you touch them,” she said. I recognized a desire there, in her eyes, her voice, as if she held up a mirror to my own. No other empty text had ever approached and spoken to me.

  I reached for her hand.

  “Don’t touch me,” she said. “Just them.”

  We knelt over the body of the text.

  “Here,” I said, and moved my fingers up to the wire around the head. “Feel how cold the wire is. Imagine the way it feels, to have your flesh try to grow around it.”

  She touched the wires. I saw that her hands trembled. Did she have the same desire I had? The same fear and anticipation?

  I moved my palms down across the jagged welts, traced them with my fingers. “They won’t hurt you,” I said.

  She, too, ran her fingers along the tattoos, down across the throat, the shoulders, the chest. “I’m not afraid,” she said.

  But she was afraid of them. I already knew it, even then.

  “Do they feel anything?” she said.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We’re not allowed to ask, and I don’t like them to talk.”

  I traced a line of tattoos that brought my fingertips to hers. She looked at our hands there, joined atop the text.

  She withdrew her fingers from mine. “I told you not to touch me,” she said. She stood up to walk away.

  “Wait!” I said. “What are you called?”

  “I don’t tell dumb bodies such things,” she said. She jumped from niche and into the hallway.

  I did not see her for many days afterward. The overseers had deemed my independent study complete, and they lumped me back into a student group watching the dictation sessions. The art of dictation was the most difficult an archivist had to learn. I had already accompanied the archivists on feeding and cleaning sessions, but it was the
dictation that most interested me. Here I could perfect bodies with my own hands.

  Sometimes I snuck away from a dictation session early and wandered the lonely corridors, passed row upon row of texts. Sometimes I came to corridors that had been barred with a thick steel gate. These were the libraries that had already been purged. I had watched the archivists unhook the bodies from the tubing that bound them to the floors of their niches. The archivists carted the bodies out on long wheeled trolleys. Piles of bodies. When I asked why they had to get rid of them I was always given the same answer:

  “The keepers are dying. We must conserve only the most important truth.”

  But who decided what the most important truth was?

  So I walked down the long halls, passing those texts the keepers still retained, and I searched for the student I’d touched over the text. I often dreamed of her. In those days my dreams of her were pleasant ones – our bodies entwined, my mouth on her skin. The dreams sickened me at first. She was ugly, incomplete. What kind of a body had I become?

  Yet my desire for her was so great that I did not eat or sleep or visit the texts for three days while I looked for her. When I found her she was just outside one of the barred corridors, following a train of archivists carting out obsolete texts.

  “Anish,” she said.

  “What are you called?” I said.

  We stared at one another.

  I wanted her name, as if knowing that, I could own her and begin to fill her emptiness.

  “Help me with the cleaning of the texts,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She told my overseer that she wished to work with me, and my overseer agreed without hesitation.

  She strode quickly back down to the archival corridors, so fast on her long legs that I had to struggle to keep up. She did not go down the long individual history corridor where most of the other students clustered. Instead, she took me back to the Unmaking Hall where those exquisite texts of the end of human freedom were still held.

  She stepped into one of the empty niches. She gazed around at the clean floor, the bare walls. “We took this one out today,” she said.