The Book of Tears

Ding! The sound was Pavlovian. Ding! Ding! Ding! It reminded Henri of a cash register drawer opening back when cash was a thing. The good old days. He tickled his nose with the feathery tip of his quill, remembering other forgotten things. Full-bodied Bordeaux. The piquant bite of blue cheese. The thud of his feet over tree roots as he ran through the woods, breathing in dank fog and the heady warmth of oak, pine, sweat. Birdsong like a symphony. Skinny-dipping in saltwater. Sand. Stars. Sunshine. Rain. And then, the sharp memory of her—blonde hair haloing her face as she twirled around a bonfire, a whirl of stars above unable to outshine her smile.

All the lost things. All the wild things. Henri’s private fever-dream of history.

He sighed as loudly as he could without alerting his compatriots in Modular F. Then he set down the makeshift quill and wrung his hands to stop their trembling. Where to start? And where to end? Her laugh? Her face? Her touch? Her taste? Her death?

“Do you want to make me cry, get me killed, or make me rich?” He side-eyed the little black book suspiciously. It ignored his interrogation. Sherlock at least would have meowed in untranslatable consolation. Sherlock! Henri added cats to the list of remembered things. Ding! The book jauntily cataloged the feline’s addition and sat waiting, inert. Henri felt sure he could hear it slathering. He suspected it craved his words even more than he craved its rewards.

* * * *

He had not meant to collect memories in the little black notebook. At first, he sought only to preserve it. Despite being plucked from a drain near Modular R, the notebook had seemed so pure, so reverent. Willing his face to stay calm, Henri had peered around for a CamBot, fearing some sick plot to ferret him out along with his memories. Seeing nothing, he stuffed the book beneath his jacket, its weight pressing like angina on his thumping heart all the way back to Modular F.

In the compound, Ebert sat on the bed, pulling on socks. “Twelve thousand four hundred and ninety-eight,” he mumbled glumly when Henri entered.

Henri whistled through his teeth and committed the number to memory. It was a tedious game they could not help but play. Even one more unit would do. Twelve thousand four hundred and ninety-nine units to fill, twelve thousand four hundred and ninety-nine … take one down, turn it around. Yes, he would beat it or they would beat him. Tomorrow, the number would rise.

More. More. More. More.

Twenty thousand would buy their freedom they had been told. Henri doubted that. You could not buy back freedom that was no longer for sale.

After Ebert had washed his face, noisily consumed his allotted portion of protein, tugged on his jackboots, and departed for the factory, Henri finally withdrew the book and allowed his fingertips to skim the onyx leather. Its softness, its pores, its flaws, its transient, organic permanence mesmerized him. He felt a frisson of excitement at a near-cellular level. He, too, knew what it was to have once been alive.

Ebert’s footsteps in the corridor, returning for some forgotten thing, congealed Henri’s wonder to fury. Ebert Hess had no manners, no wants, no desires, no memories. He was exactly as the accountants had promised—free. Free from the struggle for food or shelter or money or medication or gratification. Free to obtain his daily allocation from the Portal. Free to spend twelve hours working and twelve more doing nothing but forgetting he had ever needed anyone or anything else. How Henri hated him.

Henri jammed the book back under his mattress in the hollow his body made when he lay on top, dreaming of her face.

“Sorry!” Ebert strode to a keypad on the far wall and punched in a code. He hitched up his khaki coverall sleeve and used his elbow to nudge the beige button protruding from the wall. A whirr accompanied the Portal’s neon glow as the vault’s door clicked open.

“Gas mask fulfillment complete.” Portia’s politely banal voice informed him.

Ebert grunted and shook the mask at Henri. “They are initiating another stream,” he explained.

Henri shrugged. It was their third effort to create rain this week. “Will that change the accounts?”

Ebert ran a hand through his mousy hair, flattening it, and then slung the straps of the grey facemask over his head. “Unlikely.” He marched for the door, the mask muting his goodbye.

Henri swore under his breath. Another portion of protein would be nice. He closed his eyes, remembering cheese. He did not intend to fall asleep, nor to dream of cows and trees folded into pages, brushed by feathers, made magical by pain.

* * * * *

When he awoke, Henri examined the book again. Its silk-cream pages called to him like a siren song, begging to be filled with the most dangerous of things: memories.

It had taken him weeks to idle a feather through a hole in the thick canvas that encased his mattress. It had taken several more to smuggle enough small dark stones to grind against each other in the wash sink during Ebert’s work shift, mixing the ochre with a film of water so meager that its usage might go unnoticed, wiping the sink out with his handkerchief afterward.

Finally, the day came when Henri smoothed his palm over the blank page and, trembling, dipped the end of the quill in the ink. He tapped the nib on his wrist and hesitated, letting the quill hover in mid-air. The ink splattered—a dark thumbprint of shame. It was too grey, its viscosity too inconsistent for the task. Henri clapped the book shut and shoved it back under his mattress, embarrassed by his own dangerous impulses.

* * * *

The book’s bulk arrested him for a month, waking him every night. The paralysis of purity, the pain of remembering—what was stopping him? The fear of her name looping and curling into life, making her manifest in this washed-out, soulless, wordless world.

Henri held the book to his heart for a moment. He flipped over the first page, sniffed the papery woodiness. Lovingly, he fingered the book’s spine, the way he had once traced hers as she curled into his body. He remembered the crimson bloom of his hickey on her pale throat, the accidental bruise of his firm grip on her thigh. He had always wanted to leave an impression.

This time, mindful of the water use, Henri ground the ink with droplets of his blood, testing the color on his inner wrist until it was as dusty pink as her lips. Only then did he set the nib on the blank page and etch the only word that could match its perfection. Jarrah.

At the sight of her name, a tear slid down his nose. It left a shining, saline watermark before being absorbed by the parchment. Gone. Just like Jarrah. Like his life. Swallowed up. Into a book of tears, he thought, and the droplet reappeared like a vein of tea-colored indelible ink, flowing to the book’s spine. Henri watched, incredulous, as it hardened to a dewy amber and, by some alchemy, began to grow and to gleam. Ding! It fell from the book’s spine as a perfect flat gold coin.

The random noise and the inexplicable magic had made Henri laugh aloud for the first time in three years. Taking up the quill, he scrawled a second word—loved. Ding! “Shhhh!” he cautioned. The faintest trace of the nib across the paper seemed to clamor in his ears.

Me, he scrawled. Ding!

He reread the sentence: Jarrah loved me. He still believed it to be true, even now.

She. Ding!

Died. Ding!

For. Ding!

Me. Ding!

* * * * *

[Four years earlier]

“It’s no use,” Henri kissed Jarrah’s furrowed brow and pulled her down into the sand with him under a shelter of leaves. “There is no one left to listen.”

“We need more!” Jarrah stared at the sky, absent-mindedly trawling her hand over his sunburned chest. “Your ribs are showing. How can we go on like this? How can anyone? When was the last time there was fish? Oysters? Anything?”

“Because they pulp it, drag it all in nets to portion out to the cells.” Henri sat up, crossing thin arms over his bony knees. “They’d do the same to us—drag us in, beat us to a pulp.” He flipped a curl from her face. “Throw us in the vat. We are protein too.”

“If we all refused to stay silent. If we all refused to do nothing!” Jarrah’s voice pitched erratically. Henri focused on her freckles, delicate and golden and new to her pale skin. “You’re just hungry. Tomorrow I’ll find the energy to dig for yams.” She would let herself be convinced this time, he thought, but she would never let herself be silenced for long. It scared him.

“We are dying here, Henri, while they take more, more, more.” She leaped to her feet, patting sand off her knees. “Will we starve to death tomorrow because you refuse to fight today?”

“Fight them.” He jumped to his feet, too, grabbing her frail shoulders. “Fight them—Drones? PolBorgs?” he yelled. “There is nothing we can say or do to stop their cruelty. We are alive out here, Jarrah. Free! You must remember that.”

She turned her back, pacing, raking her matted hair with dirty fingernails. “Free to starve! You used to be brave, Henri. How I admired you. So handsome, so principled. All your talk of revolution, of dignity. You used to believe in things! And now … ” Her sob drew an accusation, which she spat at him. “You used to tell me words were worth something.”

But words were of no value when they dragged her—so beautifully, clawingly feral—into Citizen’s Square. When they stood her up, breasts thrust forward by the pike at her back. When they shot her there, curses still bleeding from her lips, while he and the horrified new Citizens of Cell 5 watched in grave, traitorous silence.

* * * * *

Each word bled into the page, drying paler and thinner. Henri’s fingers, blotched with blood and ochre, cramped around the quill. He scrawled feverishly, word after bitter word, emotion cresting within him, heightened by that slot-machine tone and the golden glint of salvation. Ding! Ding! Ding! Ding! Over and over and over again.

More. More. More. More.

* * * * *

Ebert Hess opened the door to the compound and took two giant strides back. A torrent of glittering coins clattered from the room and pooled around his calves.

“Henri?” Trapped by the morass, Ebert leaned over to peer through the doorway. Gold lent eerie highlights to the room’s drabness. Floor to ceiling, a pile of it shone, tens of thousands of dollar’s worth, but an object surfing on top caught Ebert’s attention.

“What on Earth?” He waded in and swept it up in his meaty paw. It seemed familiar, perched on the edge of Ebert’s memory. Some long-forgotten moment rang out like … a bell. A schoolyard. A book! Ebert had never been much of a reader, but he flipped it open and managed well enough. Some rot about a love affair, a cat, a list of foods and trees. Then, a thousand times or more, scrawled messily in blood, “Words are worth something! Words are worth something! Words are worth something!”

He grunted. Clearly, Henri had lost his damn mind. His body was probably buried beneath all this mess. Ebert tossed the book onto the floor. Worthless nonsense. It landed with a faint ding.

Bending, Ebert plucked a single golden disc from the pile, inspecting it between his thumb and forefinger. He half-remembered this too. Might be worth something one day, Ebert thought, slipping it into his pocket. He straightened, his heart quickening at the act of betrayal. Then he bent and picked up another, and another.

More. More. More. More.