Give My Sisters Quiet Sleep

Previously: Bat and Mina have a fraught conversation post-surgery, or post-whatever it is Dr. Manz did to Mina’s busted-up knee. Mina probably won’t walk right again. Champ the stupid robot just wants to hang out.

— 53 —

Batya carries Mina to her bed in their room buried deep within Hawthorne Grain HQ. She tucks their father’s patchwork quilt around the steel rods in her sister’s knee. The air purifiers hum.

Margaret looms in the doorway, overseeing. “Manz did clean work.”

“I guess,” Bat says.

“How would you characterize his bedside manner?”

Bat tries to remember. “He was surly, and then he made me drink a drug to shut me up.”

“Good, good,” Margaret says. “He’ll fit right in here.”

Then three scrawny teenagers shove Margaret out of the way, forcing themselves into the tiny space and throwing themselves at Mina. They grab for her hands, her face, her hair.

“Minaaa,” the archivists wail. They’re sobbing.

“How bad is it?” Anabel says.

“It looks bad,” Carmen says.

“Is it bad?” Kimani says.

“I’m OK,” Mina says, her voice a thin rasp. “Back at it in a few days.”

Bat is baffled by this intrusion, and anyway it’s claustrophobic enough in here without these three weirdos in the mix. She says, “Back up, give her some space.”

The archivists glare at her, their faces flushed and wet.

“You shut up!” Anabel says.

“This is all your fault!” Carmen says.

“You ruined everything!” Kimani says, and shoves Bat to the floor.

Bat is so caught off-guard that it doesn’t even occur to her to slap the tears off their idiot faces. She just lies there, blinking, slack-jawed.

“You’re supposed to protect her!” they howl. “What else are you good for?”

“Ladies,” Margaret snaps. “Pull yourselves together. Go to your room. Eat something healthy.”

“Keelhaul this cunny!”

Too Handsome Anthony handsomely appears, arms akimbo, handsome. “Enough!” He starts grabbing elbows and legs, pulling the archivists away from the bed and tossing them, one by one, out into the common area.

Margaret smiles, bids Bat adieu, then retreats and slams the steel door shut, mercifully muffling the teenagers’ shrieks of rage.

Bat shakes her head to clear it, looks at the door, looks at her sister. “The hell?”

Mina attempts a shrug. “They’re very attached.”

“To you?”

“Yes.”

Bat is deeply confused. “What is their deal?”

About ten years ago, approximately the same time Bat and Mina’s parents left town for good, Margaret Feddema came up with some genius idea and wrote it down on a scrap of paper and then lost the paper and then had a meltdown. This was when she was Vice President of Glenndenning Global. “It was important and beautiful,” she said to a terrified assistant, “and it is now lost to me forever.”

So Margaret decided to create a team that would be responsible for recording and transcribing every word she said. She wanted to be able to say something and know that someone was out there (not in her line of sight, ideally in another room) hearing it, writing it down, memorizing it, filing it, and ready to recite it back to her anytime, anywhere.

She had her surveillance guy come in and install microphones in strategic locations (including her private bathroom and the secret courtyard where she ate lunch every day) and that was a good start, but then the question became: Who would do the listening? Who could a) be on call around the clock, b) be able to absorb and process the gigantic volume of information Margaret consumed and created every day, and c) be trusted with the highly sensitive and dangerous and precious contents of her mind? She certainly couldn’t recruit anyone in-house—the Global org chart was packed tight with literal backstabbers. No, she needed fresh stenographers she could put her stamp on.

She called up her pal Estra Maxie who’d done some bounty hunting for the company in the past. Her razor-sharp business cards simply read LOST IS FOUND. Margaret said, “I need a small crew who can be trained to listen and transcribe and process and replay. And because of the delicate nature of the intel they’ll be privy to, we’ll need to keep them on the premises. Indefinitely. So, the fewer attachments the better.”

Estra nodded and started talking about dendrites and neurotransmitters and synapses, and how the time to teach people a second language is when they’re young because their brains haven’t quite gelled yet. “You need them little,” she said. “I know the streets of this city, and I know the children who have been abandoned there. Give me two days.”

She hit the orphanages, the shelters, the nooks inside Guncotton Terminal. She spoke to dozens of broken kids, looking into their eyes and seeing a kind of empty despair looking back. Most wanted nothing to do with her, some got violent, some got clingy. It wasn’t the worst day of her life, but it was certainly one of the bleakest.

By the next afternoon, Estra had a list of eighteen candidates, ranging from the age of six to ten. She saw something in each one, some glimmer of understanding that they might have a future beyond today. Or, the way she put it to Margaret: They are not quite ready to die yet.

Then she had to convince them she wasn’t a slave trader, drug dealer, pornographic pamphleteer, etc. Thirty dollars usually settled it. They agreed to meet at Global for a briefing and an all-you-can-eat buffet. Only eleven showed up—seven girls and four boys. They were tiny and hard and stunk of the docks.

Margaret sat them down and did a little presentation, projecting some diagrams on the conference room screen. She played some recordings of herself and had them repeat what they heard. She told two of them to leave, not appreciating their attitude. Then she fed the others and put them up at a nearby hotel that was nice but not too nice—Estra had recommended against scaring them off with too much luxury. By morning, three of them had stolen the pillows and soap and vanished, but the rest were ready to go to work.

Eight weeks of training. Some of the kids didn’t know how to write and that gave Margaret the idea of teaching them an encrypted shorthand for additional security. Then: listening, memorization, recall, categorization, cataloguing, indexing, abstracting. Role playing. Speech therapy. Holistic theory. Elucidation. Penmanship. Logic. They listened to hours of tapes and wrote everything down. They labeled and cross-referenced each transcription and remembered exactly where they put it.

In the evenings, Margaret went home and Estra took care of them. She cooked them dinner and calmed them down. Later, she started coaxing out their stories. They didn’t meet each other’s eyes as they talked about drunks and back rooms and never sleeping. They lifted up their crisp new shirts to show infected wounds. They learned each other’s real names. The connection between them became very intense and intimate.

Then, on what the kids would later call graduation, Margaret escorted them through a concealed door in the heart of the Global office building. This led into a large, multi-level apartment that had originally been for James Glenndenning’s various trysts until he relocated those activities to an offsite warehouse for tax purposes.

Margaret gave them a tour, saying this would be their new living quarters. Admittedly, it didn’t look like a home for children, it looked like the love nest it was, what with the flowing drapery and gas fireplace and nude oil paintings and pink jacuzzi and conversation pit and light jazz piped in via discreet speakers, but it was still vastly superior to anything the kids had ever seen before.

Each one would have their own room and their own lockable trunk to stash anything they wanted to keep to themselves. They’d get whatever they wanted to eat and whatever they wanted to wear. They could have a pet as long as it was containable and not disruptive. (This was all definitely a precursor to how Margaret set up Hawthorne Grain.) 

At this point in the tour, Margaret pointed to the door leading back out to the main office. You’ll have everything you need, she said, but you won’t be allowed to leave. After she closed this door again, it would be sealed shut. Because out there were people who would break them open to see what they knew. But in here they’d be safe, with no wounds and no drunks. So if anyone wanted to leave, now was the time.

There was a long moment and then one of the girls and the only remaining boy got up and walked out, not looking back. One of the other girls started crying a little but didn’t move.

And that was it. Margaret closed the door and Estra hugged the new team:

Anabel (6), Archivist of Material

Carmen (7), Archivist of Personnel

Kimani (8), Archivist of History

Nicola (9), Archivist of Commerce

Their shifts were spent in soundproof booths, headphones clamped over their ears, tiny pens scurrying to keep up. Documents were filed in the Archive, the bottom floor of the apartment, which looked like pure chaos but was tightly organized according to their own internal rules.

After some rough starts and refinements to the system, it all worked smoothly. By the sixth month, they had a record of every word Margaret said every day, and if she needed to refer to something, it was as simple as shouting out to the concealed microphones. From straightforward queries like, “What did I agree to on 14 March?” to those that required more insight like, “Who is this person and what can they do for me?”

The archivists came to operate on an almost instinctive level. Much of their communication was nonverbal. They were constantly improving their methodology, refining their codes.

They ate dinner together every night, sitting in the pit. They passed the time by putting on shows for each other—some recitals, some plays. In their third year, they collaborated on a series of stories about a girl whose hair burst into flames whenever she got upset.

Sometimes there were fights. As they got older, they formed alliances that seemed to change by the hour. Trunks were broken into and diaries read. Unforgivable things were said.

The only time they saw natural light was during the brief and supervised trips up to the secret courtyard to watch the stars make their arc. But despite never going outside, they had a rich understanding of the world due to everything they heard. Or rather, a rich understanding of Margaret’s world. They learned the finer points of extortion, graft, smuggling, blackmail, forgery, wet work. They knew who the players were, who ran what, who wanted what, who cheated on whom. They knew the underbelly of Fort Hook (a town that is almost all underbelly) better than just about anyone.

Nevertheless, they did live inside a windowless apartment in an office building with very little human contact, so there were always little gaps in their knowledge. And those gaps got filled in with the weird shit that kids make up, like how winter was three months of total darkness, and the country was ruled by two pairs of triplets, and rain was hot like in the shower, and somewhere out there was a parallel group of male archivists.

But the most significant invention turned out to be Big Sister. She started out as a little bedtime story that Carmen came up with. Not even a story, really—just a character, some woman out there in the city who knew about them. That was it. A woman who knew their names, knew where they lived, knew their histories. And she followed their development from afar, never interfering but taking an interest for reasons she kept to herself.

The other girls immediately warmed to this concept and Big Sister grew in their minds, in the dead space between them, becoming their own personal archivist, familiar with their every thought, not judging but empathizing, reassuring them in their times of need, helping them decide between right and wrong.

A PRAYER: Dear Big Sister, please make Annie shut up with her boring theories. Please let you-know-who not make a big deal about holding hands after lights out. Please let C just go to bed early and be quiet. Please let us go to the courtyard tomorrow, if it is fair. Please give my sisters quiet sleep, and whatever dreams they request, OK so long.

In their eighth year, Nicola managed to hang herself with a belt. She left a note on the bathroom counter. It was addressed to Big Sister but written in the tiny cramped inscrutable shorthand that only they knew how to read.

A few weeks later, the remaining three archivists tried to escape. They’d made plenty of exploratory attempts over the years—via the fireplace flue, the air vents, the dumbwaiter—but nothing serious until then. Their plan was simple and ill-conceived: bludgeon the guard with a goldfish bowl and then flee the building.

They didn’t even make it to the elevators.

The archivists found the experience terrifying on a kind of primal level. Afterward, they would speak to each other in whispers about their glimpse of the outside world—a fairly generic office corridor with beige walls and a garbage can and a thing they didn’t recognize (a water cooler) but called something like azure virus in their internal language—as if it were a passageway to hell.

By that time, Margaret was already planning to defect from Glenndenning Global and start her own operation, but the girls’ escape accelerated things. She wanted to get them out of that building and into a more normal home where they could be normal kids, especially since they were hitting puberty and losing their goddamn minds.

That didn’t happen, of course. Margaret defected and poached the archivists and they ended up in an even smaller set of rooms at the bottom of the ocean. However, they were no longer Margaret’s human tape recorders but instead her trusted strategists, researching leads and jobs, providing recommendations and performing triage. And they had far more privacy and freedom than before. Margaret told them they could leave HQ whenever they wanted.

But they didn’t. They hardly got further than arm’s length away from each other. They continued to be haunted by what they now call upstairs.

Then, a year or so back, Wilhelmina Hull started working at Hawthorne. And she reminded them of the dead archivist. And, without even discussing it, they started referring to her, among themselves, in their secret encrypted language, as Big Sister.

Bat sits at the foot of the bed, biting a hangnail. “Had a feeling those girls were indoorsy.”

“Just let them shake it out,” Mina says. “They don’t deal well with sudden changes to the routine.”

“Will they say they’re sorry for being rude as hell?”

“No. But there might be a little treat waiting for you outside the door in the morning. Or you might get some cush jobs. Assuming you make it through tomorrow.”

Bat turns to her. “You don’t think I can do it.”

“Nobody seems to think anyone can do it. Maybe go talk to the other couriers, see if they have anything. They’re probably tying one on, might be a good time to go make friends.”

Bat gets up, tries to fix her hair. “I’m not great at making friends.”

“I know.”

“All right, well. Don’t run off while I’m gone.”

“That’s not funny,” Mina says. “Here’s the thing. There’s a part of me that wishes the archivists had torn you the fuck apart.”

+++

This has been Chapter 53 of Chokeville, a novel by Josh Fireland.

Next up: A Dash of Gunpowder