1.
After a while—we had by then lost track of not only the day but also what month exactly it was—I realized that my sister had begun to speak in a language I could not understand. I cannot mark a moment when this change occurred. There must have been a period when she’d spoken it, or some mélange of English and this new tongue, and I, somehow, didn’t notice, responding instead to her gestures or to what I thought she must have been saying. But then something, some sound, a clatter of metal falling, caught my attention and I looked for the tin or the pan that had been dropped and realized the sound was proceeding from her mouth.
Was it me? I wondered at first. Some slippage in my brain, some malfunction of my hearing apparatus? I shook my head to awaken my mind, scraped the inside of each earhole with my smallest fingers.
“Come again?” I said.
Her brow furrowed. She spoke again, that same clatter of metal, incomprehensible. It was not the sort of sound that was possible for a human throat to make, and yet her throat made it.
But I am getting ahead of myself. I have lived alone now for long enough to no longer have a proper sense of how to convey a story to another being. Even before I lived alone, it was only my sister and me, and our relationship was, shall we say, peculiar. Even before she lost her ability to speak in the way humans do, she was odd, and we had lived together so long as to make the need to converse with one another nearly superfluous. We did speak, occasionally, but gestured more often than moved our lips, and in general lived in that brusque and silent accord enjoyed, if enjoyed is the right word, by certain long-married couples. Or so my sister suggested to me. Besides us, I have not met any couples, long-married or otherwise, so I cannot say with certainty.
Not that we were living as if married—no, our relations were at all times innocent and chaste, as if we were merely those children’s dolls that give every appearance of being human until you remove their clothing and see the smooth plane where genitalia would otherwise be. Still, we had been so long in one another’s company that she knew nearly always what I was thinking and I knew the same about her. We shared that odd intimacy that comes from living partly in one’s own head and partly in another’s.
I loved my sister deeply, or as deeply as any sexless doll could. Perhaps I have exhausted that metaphor. I do not wish to suggest I am, or ever have been, anything other than human. I was born in the usual way, the issue of a mother and a father—so I have been told. I have no memory of my parents, though my sister always insisted that yes, we had a mother and a father. It is important to note this fact, though I cannot independently verify it. By the time my memories began, my parents were dead.
My sister would sometimes recount their deaths to me late at night, as she was trying to coax me to sleep, acting this out with the two poseable dolls that we possessed. To comfort me, I suppose. An odd notion of comfort, indeed, and yet hearing stories about their deaths allowed them to be alive again for me for just a moment, before they were once again consigned to death. She told the story each time in a different way so that I was never quite sure what the truth was. Indeed, I half suspected that one evening she would not recount their deaths at all, that she would confess that my parents were still alive and waiting for me somewhere—in a concealed room in the house, say, or through the door set in one side of the house that we never used. But whether she intended to tell me this or not, she did not do so before her speech changed and she could tell me nothing at all.
In many of the versions she told of the story, my parents were settlers, pioneers, the first in this place, and because of a failure of some kind, left alone, just the two of them. Sometimes she said we were in a remote area of a southern continent and my parents had been the only survivors of a boat that sunk. Sometimes it was a separate world entirely and they had arrived through the air or by slipping underneath the usual order of things or by passing through a mirror.
“Separate world,” I mused. “Separate from what?”
“From where they came from,” my sister said.
“And where was that?” I asked.
But she shook her head. For her, this was not part of the story.
There they were, the two dolls that represented my parents, my sister’s hands making them jump up and down slightly as she moved them across my blanket. She made my father speak in a voice that was lower than hers, my mother higher. They stopped, looked around.
“Do you suppose it’s safe?” asked my mother in her high voice. “Should we turn back?”
“We can’t turn back,” my father said. “We have no choice.”
And then they were screaming, moved by sleight of hand under my blanket, made to vanish, simply gone.
“Again,” I said. Smiling, my sister obliged.
Whatever the case, whatever had happened to my parents, it had something to do with our house, which was not, as my sister informed me, properly speaking, a house. Its windows were circular and made of thick glass and could not be opened without removing a series of screws and prying off a rubberized seal and a sturdy metal ring. There were two dozen of these windows, strung down a long cylindrical central hallway that constituted the majority of our dwelling. At one end, traveling gently downslope, was a hatch that led to my room. The room had the same circumference as the cylindrical hallway but a depth of no more than seven or eight feet. At the other end of the hallway, upslope, was a hatch leading to the room that had become my sister’s, a kind of tapered cone with glass walls that had been burnt a smoky and opaque black.
In the middle of the central hallway, on each side, was a door, a window in its upper half. One side looked out on what seemed to be a flat and barren plain—as did all the windows in the hallway not on a door. The other door’s window opened onto deep darkness, as if onto nothing at all.
The first door, to the plain, could be used in time of need, my sister taught me. The second door, no, never. To open the second door would be to invite the end.
“What do you mean by ‘the end’?” I asked.
Again, she just shook her head.
“What’s out there?” I asked, peering through the window of the second door, through the only window that looked out into darkness. “Is anything out there?”
“Don’t open that door,” she said firmly. “Promise me.”
Despite my promise, I tried once to open the second door. There was a procedure required for this to happen, a process inscribed on the door itself. First the door had to be primed, and then a countdown would begin. Finally, I would have to throw a lever and the door would spring open.
I got as far as priming the door. I had not realized that this would also trigger a dimming of the lights and the peal of an alarm. The sound brought my sister running from her room, her face creased with panic. She quickly unprimed the door and scolded me. The whole time she was doing so, I was wondering if I had the strength of will to disable her and continue the process.
Apparently, I did not.
When my sister was still alive, we kept mainly to ourselves, to our own quarters. My sister referred to them as quarters and so I did as well. We would meet for meals in her quarters, feeding off the provisions that were stored behind the panels of the central hallway.
Eventually, my sister never tired of informing me, our provisions would run out. In preparation for this, she had begun to forage outside. Sometimes she would slip through the door—the first door, not the second—and come back with something to eat. She would be gone mere minutes sometimes, other times hours. Often, when I was young especially, I would stand by the door and await her return. Sometimes I would go instead to the second door and consider pursuing the procedure to open it, but I worried that my sister, who, after all, knew my thoughts almost as well as I did, was waiting for this, just outside the first door, and would stop me if I tried.
I often at these moments placed my hand on this second door. It was cold to the touch. It would have taken a mere flick of the wrist to activate the sequence, and yet I never did.
When she returned, she was dragging a carcass of a sort of creature unlike anything she had taught me about: a tangle of legs, oozing clusters of eyes, limbs that continued to throb even in death. Or simply gobbets of flesh, still weeping blood, cut from what creature I couldn’t say. Out of breath, she would drag her latest find into her quarters and close the hatch. When she next opened it, there would be no sign it had ever been there.
“What’s out there?” the dolls that were my parents would sometimes say as they were propelled across my blanket by my sister’s hand. “Why does the view out the first door’s window look so different from the view out of the second? Why is there darkness beyond only one door?”
But they never had an answer.
“Shall we go through the first door?” one would say to the other.
“Shall we go through the second?” the other might respond.
If the dolls went out the second door, they would die immediately. If they went out the first door, they might wander for a time before eventually dying.
“Either way, they die,” I pointed out.
“Yes,” said my sister. “Remember that. In the end, they always die.”
Why did the view from that door’s window look so different from the other windows?
I asked my sister this, expecting her, like the dolls of our parents, whom she in fact spoke for, to have no answer. I was surprised when she gave the question serious consideration.
“It is as though we are in two places at once,” she finally said. “One door opens onto one place, and the other on to another.”
“Then,” I said, steadying myself on the wall beside me, “what place does that make this?”
“No place,” she said. “This is not a place at all.”
But if something is not a place, what is it? Can it be said to be anything? And what can be said of those living within it?
2.
My sister had always been the one to instruct me. In the absence of my parents, she fed me, clothed me, reared me. Everything I know about what it means to be human I know from things she said to me or from images, moving or still, she showed me on the still-functioning screen in her quarters. Now that she is gone, the screen will not work for me. I wonder sometimes how much of what I think I know is embroidered falsely upon these images, is my mind working with what it was given to create another, fuller, more promising world.
“Can you understand me?” I asked her.
She nodded.
“Say yes,” I said.
A distressed screech, proceeding unnaturally from her mouth, though she did not seem unsettled by it. Indeed, she seemed placid, calm.
“Do you not hear that?” I asked. “How you sound?”
A long hesitation, then she shook her head. She opened her mouth and it was suddenly as if I were inside a car as it crashed, metal buckling and crumpling all around me.
I fled.
Another attempt, an hour later, perhaps two, once I had steeled myself again. There I was, knocking on her hatch until she opened it.
“Hello,” I said.
When she responded, in a low whisper, it was as if a pot was being scoured by sand. I winced, and she immediately fell silent.
I extended to her a writing pad, a pen. “Perhaps this will work better,” I said.
She nodded and took them with a little bow. Furiously she scribbled on the pad, filling first one page, then a second. When she finally, triumphantly, handed the pad back to me, however, it was covered only in senseless script, clotted and gnarled: gibberish.
For a time, we simply avoided one another. I hoped from one day to the next that something would change, that I would simply awaken one morning and find everything to have reverted back to normal, to have us both speaking the same language again. Instead, with each day, the gap between us grew until, after a week, a few weeks, once the plain outside the first door glittered with frost, it was as though there had never been intimacy between the two of us at all. The meals we had shared before we now took separately, each in our own quarters. If I came out of my quarters to find her in the central hall, I would turn around and retreat, and if the situation were reversed she would do the same.
We might have gone on like this a very long time, until the day I discovered her body lying facedown in the hall or she discovered mine. Instead, something happened.
My sister would still, despite everything, sometimes leave in search of food. She would go out the first door and be gone an hour, a day. She returned burdened by hunks of bluish flesh or hauling the gooey remains of a carapace.
When I heard her leave the house, as soon as I was sure I was alone, I went out into the hallway and stood by the door, the second door, and pondered opening it. I would stand with my hand on the mechanism, staring out the window into the darkness, staring at nothing, until I heard the sound of the first door opening and my sister returning. Then I would rush back to my quarters.
Until one day, staring into the darkness, staring at nothing, I realized that there was something there after all.
How long I had been staring, I didn’t know. Long enough to feel as if I were no longer in my body, as if I were nowhere at all. And then something, a flicker or flash of movement in the glass, caught my attention and brought me back.
It was, I thought at first, a reflection of my face, the ghost of my own image caught in the glass and cast back at me. As I moved my own face slightly, smiled, inclined my head, the ghostly image in the glass reacted precisely as expected. It was only when I settled again, stared out again, motionless, that I realized the flicker was still there.
I held very still. It was there, deep in the darkness beyond the glass, drawn perhaps to this face (my own) it saw through the glass. I waited. I watched and waited.
And yes, there it was, features nearly aligned with my own reflection. There was barely anything there, and yet there was something there.
By the time my sister returned, I was back in my quarters, turning over what I had seen. A face, almost like my own but not quite, nearly submerged in the murk. I had the dolls—my sister had abandoned them in my room and had not retrieved them after her voice transformed—and with these I played out what had happened.
The doll that had been my father I designated to be me. He walked down the long, cylindrical hall, in the trough formed between my legs by the dip of the blanket. Halfway down, at the hall’s knee, the doll stopped and looked out the thick circular window set in the door. Did he see anything? No, he did not. Or did he? He wasn’t sure, he almost turned away, and then suddenly—
There, pushing up against the blanket from beneath, the other doll, the one who had been my mother. What was it now? The doll that was me couldn’t make out her features through the blanket, not clearly, though he knew that something was there, something roughly human in form.
It was only a question of how to coax her out from the darkness.
A number of days passed before my sister went outside again. I waited impatiently, hardly leaving my room, afraid to show too much interest in the second door while my sister was still inside. But then at last, finally, she left.
I rushed immediately to the second door, peering out into the darkness. I waited. Nothing was there. And then, though I could see little more than my own reflection, I felt something was.
“Hello?” I said. “Don’t be afraid.”
Nothing changed or moved, not a thing.
“Please,” I said, “let me see you.” But as I said it I realized that I didn’t need to see to know. That something, an idea, had already begun to coalesce in my mind.
And just like that, I knew who it was.
When my sister, or rather the being that had taken the place of my sister, returned to the first door, it could not open it. I had locked it from the inside. It pounded on the door, crying out in that language that was not a language. Though I could not understand a word of what it said, or even be sure that what it said were words, I knew what it wanted: to get in. It had killed my sister and taken her shape, her manners, her gestures, her whole being, but something had slipped and it could not take her speech. If I hadn’t sensed my true sister, the dead one, floating in the darkness behind the glass, I would never have known.
I let the creature pound. It would not get in. Not again.
It is still there, still pounding, its face crusted with frost. I see it in those brief moments when I tear myself away from the second door. It has been there for days now. I know what it wants—its gestures are clear enough. Open the door, they say, open the door!
And yes, I have come to believe this is something I should do: open the door. Only not the door it desires me to open.
In my bed, I play with the dolls. My father is no longer my father: he is me. My mother is no longer my mother: she is my sister. Not the pretender: the real one. The male doll goes down the hall and stops to stare through the dark window set in the door. He sees something. Or not sees exactly: senses. He is sure something is there. Or rather someone. Impossible, since she is dead, but somehow still there nonetheless. He waits, and watches, and then he initiates the procedure. He arms the door. The countdown begins, lights flash, an alarm sounds. And then, after a moment, he is free to throw the lever and open the door and join his real sister. There she is, billowing out of the darkness, her head torn off, coming toward him.
I record this in a language that I, at least, can understand, having as I do no other. Whether anyone else will come who can understand remains to be seen. Though not by me: I am going to step out onto the dark side of our house that is not a house. I am going to rejoin my sister. The real one. The one who is dead.
I will not be coming back.
Or rather, when I do come back, as soon as I open my mouth to speak, you will know it is not me.