Sisyphean Read online

  The worker steadied his breathing and got back to work. In his thoughts, he retraced the correct route through which he should thread the neurofungus and set to the task anew, but even though he was still in the midst of this process, the president reached into the drawers and started taking out the first of the flesh-colored blood sedges, jibão-nets, and other tenants. He spread them out on a bracket that he pulled out from a column and started pointing at them with dogged insistence.

  “If it’s the tenants you’re worried about, there’s no need,” the worker said.

  Irritated, he had raised his voice, though the president quite literally had no ears with which to hear him. He did perceive sounds by way of a different sort of system, but it tended to interpret the worker’s voice as static. A roar of criticism was still emanating from the vortex in his boss’s face, but the worker wasn’t listening, and it washed right past him as he finished prepping the slimecake.

  The worker massaged his cramping fingers, and the president crossed his long legs and twisted his body all the way around from the waist down, causing undulations in his reversed right leg. From the area around his ankle, sticky, leaden-hued waste fluids came gushing out and oozed down toward a hole covered by grating.

  At last, the worker took a limp jibão-net from the bracket. Its webbed membrane, reacting to his body heat, began to slowly stretch and expand. Starving them a little made them clamp on better. A tenant that attached to a living creature would take the place of its original blood vessels, detouring the flow and skimming off what nutrients it needed to survive. The creature to which a tenant attached would not gain weight no matter how much it might overeat, and if there were some defect in its original blood vessels, its life might well be saved by it. For these reasons, there was even a tendency to see them as a welcome presence. However, once the parthenogenic tenant had finished budding and fallen into decay, the biological landlord would suffer harmful effects such as the bursting of atrophied veins under the pressure of a sudden return of blood flow, or obesity due to an appetite that had not gone back to normal after becoming thoroughly used to overeating.

  As the worker was rolling out jibão-nets on the slimecake, he started feeling hungry, even though it was still early in the day. This concerned him. For the past few days, his appetite had been increasing strangely. Though it was true that his tenants had been given subjection treatment, he was being given raw tenants as fodder every day, so they were in his stomach. He could hardly be blamed for suspecting he might be ill.

  The president’s leg bent as it passed through his line of sight.

  A distracting thought welled up in his mind of the innocent roundfilers who had escaped the employment contracts into which they had been born. They had come to make frequent appearances in his dreams since he had heard the rumors.

  Roundfilers did the work they chose on the land they selected, and although they were poor, they lived as they wished—the jibão-net that had felt like ground meat in his hands was now like a cloth, thick with the water it had absorbed—and as the worker carried out his task, he began to imagine himself as a partaker in their lifestyle as well. As a washman, life was quiet and peaceful, his days occupied with cleaning all manner of grime and filth.

  But then one day …

  Here the worker’s daydream began to take a turn.

  A tenant masterhunter appears in the roundfilers’ village, warning them that their bodies are being consumed from within by evil spirits. With a pair of shears, the masterhunter opens up the chest of a roundfiler, cuts out a jibão-net, and holds it up high above his head. The shadow of the jibão-net falls across his triumphant visage.

  “See here! It’s just like I told you. You see this disgusting thing? This is the evil spirit that possessed you. You have recovered your health.”

  Crowds of roundfilers, eager to have their own evil spirits exorcised, rush forward to stand before the masterhunter.

  After the masterhunter departs with a great number of jibão-nets, the roundfilers who recovered their health gain weight without ceasing. The image of them overlaps with that of the winesprites of Stillville, who continually secrete strong drink.

  The worker shook his head, as if to drive away a swarm of leaf beetles. His head was enveloped in the odor of fluid waste, pungent as if from a rotting liver.

  But that can’t be. The winesprites couldn’t have been roundfilers. Visible through their hemispherical, dimly transparent shells, those bloated, pitiful-looking subjugates resembled tumors. Once the worker had been concerned about one of the winesprites installed in Stillville. Its yield of spirits had been especially low. When he had called out to it, it had responded by spreading out hunting claws that resembled the pattern of veins inside a leaf, waving them about in midair, and drawing them up.

  Ever since that day, the worker had carried the suspicion that the winesprites might not be mere jars for the brewing of spirits, but something more, something akin to workers such as himself. During one of the twice-monthly harvests, the worker had secretly brought over some tools from the office so as to pry loose a few of the hexagonal plates from its shell. In this manner, he had thought, it should be able to break through its shell from the inside and crawl out on its own. By blending into the thick fog that was peculiar to that area, it might be possible for it to escape from Stillville.

  When the next harvest time came around, its shell was an empty hollow. Filled with joy at the thought that it had managed to escape, the worker had drawn near for a look, only to find a wrinkled, desiccated corpse lying inside.

  At last realizing what had happened, the Board of Directors had gathered around the corpse of the winesprite, but then amid the fog there had risen up the shadow of a Crossing Guard, owing to which their investigation of the winesprite’s untimely death had ended without conclusion.

  2

  The boards of the many shelves that surrounded the worker were rattling.

  The worker looked up when he noticed, and on the other side of the worktable a chest wrapped around with muscle fiber had twisted perfectly sideways and turned around to the right, placing that rotating, mortar-shaped vortex close enough to touch his cheek.

  “I’m sorry. My mind was wandering.”

  The worker took a skin threader in hand, gouged a hole into the slimecake, and once he had threaded it with a tube-shaped tenant known as a blood sedge, an oily spheroid was thrust right in front of his eyes. Its entire shape was expanding and contracting with a steady rhythm. It was a type of cicada, called a lubdub.

  The instant the worker took hold of it, his arm shot upward. His own blood sedges resonated with it, throbbing to an accelerated beat and shattering the worker’s composure. He pressed the lubdub down firmly against the workbench, jammed a guidepipe into its clover-shaped mouth, wrapped the wheezing spheroid up in slimecake, and attached a temporary fastener.

  From a cage beneath the workbench he dragged out a coiled pinsnake and removed the cover from its nose. Checking to make sure a drop of poison was welling up on the tip of the pointed tongue darting in and out of its long snout, he pressed it against the throbbing slimecake and began sewing the edges together. While he was thus engaged, the pinsnake wrapped its long body around his arm and began squeezing so tightly that it hurt.

  Using the wrapped lubdub as a base, the worker fashioned the rest of the slimecake into valves and atria, letting nothing go to waste as he sewed it all up into the shape of a heart. He stuck the tubular reflex mirror down into the blood sedge protruding from its upper portion to check the interior condition of the valves. There didn’t seem to be any problems, so he peeled the pinsnake from his arm and returned it to the cage. Next, the president handed him the cardiopulmonary tube of the spherical creature itself, which he had violently dragged out after thrusting his hand back among the shelves. The worker connected it with a blood sedge, fastened a clamp onto the point of contact, and tightened
the screws. He pressed down on the heap of flesh with overlapping hands, and blood flowed into the inner cavity. The cardiopulmonary tube began to pulsate, and at last it all stabilized enough to beat a steady rhythm even after he removed his hands.

  His eye sockets throbbed with dull pain. The worker pulled off his skingloves, disinfected his hands, and pressed a finger against the middle of his brow. As his lower jaw receded into a yawn, he took a deep breath and felt disinfectant stinging at his eyes.

  The president set a stainless steel tray on the edge of the workbench. It was his one feeding of the day. Stomach acid welled up in his throat, stinging like a rasp. Today’s tray contained a maternity bug—its abdomen swollen to about the size of a fist—as well as some large and small scraps of slimecake, and a blood sedge that had died during its dependency and was just starting to go bad. As the president was lacking entirely the concept of meal preparation, each of these items was presented without garnishment.

  The worker retrieved an antiregurgitant and a digestant from the bottles lined up on the shelf and popped one of each into his mouth. Both were tiny pillbugs, albeit medicinal in name only.

  He pulled a hose out from the column beside the dependency tanks, sprayed one turn of the lever’s worth of water into his mouth, and swallowed.

  Taking the maternity bug in hand, he squeezed the giant blood-blister that was its abdomen, and popped its acidic, vitamin-rich juices onto the slimecake and blood sedge. He tossed the husk that remained onto the floor and picked up a scrap of slimecake that looked to be still somewhat edible.

  With reluctance, he tossed it into his mouth; the acidic flavor vanished without a trace right away, leaving no flavor on the slimecake at all. He chewed and chewed, but it only grew soft and rubbery, until he swallowed it down without having ever bitten through. It was still stuck in his throat when he put the next scrap into his mouth. His diaphragm tightened as when filling his lungs with air. Even with medicine suppressing the revolt in his digestive tract, this was what he had to go through just to eat. For that reason, these had long been called “vomit meals,” though vomiting was something to be avoided at all costs. Should he fail to hold it in, he would simply be force-fed his vomit once more. It made no difference to the president either way.

  A memory surfaced: he was crying as he was eating his lunch alone in the center of the classroom, while all of his classmates were moving their desks and chairs in preparation for the after-lunch cleaning. No, wait—he had always been one to eat quickly, so perhaps he was the one sticking a mop out at his pitiful classmate’s feet. Or was he the teacher who was forcing him to do that? Did that mean his present existence was his recompense for that?

  That was when the president, moving as though to shelter a lover from a blast of wind, took a qizhong large enough to hold in his arms, and without so much as plucking a feather, shoved it into his collar and swallowed it whole with his highly elastic stomach.

  The qizhong, perhaps sensing its impending death, awakened from its state of suspended animation and scattered feathers as it flapped its wings, though presently it was engulfed all the way to the tip of its tail. The president’s solar plexus bulged outward as if with a tumor, its surface changing into a distorted shape, and then the bulge slid downward all at once to his side.

  The worker picked up the blood sedge that he had put off till last, lifted his face up to the ceiling, and closed his eyes as he tried to imagine it as a grilled calcot like the ones he had eaten in a distant, foreign land that he could not have possibly ever visited. I’m peeling back the black, burnt skins and inside there are steaming white onions … He pulled the sticky strings from his fingertips and dropped it into the back of his throat … and an orange sauce that smells of almonds dribbles from my mouth … and ran down his cheek with a fishy stench.

  Through stretches and contractions in his throat, the worker swallowed the blood sedge, but when he suddenly choked on it hard, it slid right back up into his oral cavity, slipping around and around his tongue. Helpless to do anything else, he started to push it back with his fingers when an embarrassing noise came bounding up from the back of his throat. The president, to whom this had perhaps sounded like spoken words, answered,“ZoVoVo.”

  After repeatedly rinsing his mouth out with water, all that remained was a languid sense of relief such as one feels immediately after a completed dental procedure.

  Perhaps because of his disgust at this feeding, his scalp was covered in gooseflesh that wouldn’t go away. This eventually transformed into a sort of itchiness that felt like countless legs crawling about, causing the worker to run his fingers through his hair for fear that it was already crawling with lice. He didn’t feel anything moving, but as he ran his fingers through his hair, tiny objects did stick to them. He caught some of them between his fingers and tried to comb them out, but they were stuck fast and wouldn’t come loose. There was no mistaking it—these were egg cases.

  They say that lice are attracted to certain types of brain waves, and although he had been tormented by their moist presence and the sensation of them threading their way between the hairs of his head, he had never actually managed to catch one, and even when he looked at his reflection in a dependency tank, all he was able to see was his own oily hair. Because of this, he had even wondered if the egg cases—which were the only things he could actually feel—might be something secreted by his scalp.

  After spending the night in his sleepsac, the sensations of lice and eggs would be gone without a trace. Was this because the lickstrings inside fed on them, or because he recovered his peace of mind during sleep?

  I just want to get back to my sleepsac soon, the worker thought.

  The president bent over backward in apparent displeasure, and from this motion the worker surmised that a guest had arrived. Soon enough, the building began to vibrate, and even the worker could tell that the lift on the far side of the corridor was in motion.

  Quite some time ago, a giant mutant coffin eel had tunneled its way into the lift and gotten stuck inside, its body bent in the shape of an S. Although the president had ordered the worker to dispose of it, the toxicity of the outer skin was strong enough to be listed in the Fishery Catalog of Hazardous Substances, so he had doused it in a putrefaction accelerant. Later, when scraping away the runny soup of liquefied rot that had dripped down onto the floor below, he had discovered an emerald-green magatama, such as should have only been possible to take from a canvasser.

  The worker touched his shirt pocket. The magatama should have been hidden away inside, but his fingers couldn’t find the dense little bead. Perhaps he had heard the story from a colleague.

  There was a sound of folding doors sliding open and of faltering footsteps drawing near.

  From out of the gloom there appeared a male boarhead, short of stature though sturdily built, carrying a packing case with both hands. Large drops of sweat clung to his wide face, and he was breathing with apparent difficulty. A worker from the fishery, he was in charge of on-site disassembly. Though he had always arrived by boat whenever he came here, to the worker’s eyes he looked for all the world like he had crawled up from some Stygian pit.

  The disassembler set the packing case on the floor and met his eyes for an instant, then immediately looked away in a most obsequious manner. This was in all likelihood because the worker had had some sharp words for him the first time they met, when the disassembler had referred to himself as “I.”

  “That’s my name,” the worker had said. “I won’t have you referring to yourself as ‘I.’ ”

  In those days, the worker had believed that “I” was a proper noun and his own given name.

  Even before that, he also had gotten indignant with the insect breeder for plagiarizing the way he looked.

  The worker pulled on the skylight’s control lever to close its slatted shutters, and when the workshop was completely dark, the president’s body glowe
d with a faint light, and blurry shadows of his organs and skeleton became visible through his clothing. All of his waybugs could be seen crowding down into his feet.

  The disassembler took a placoderm out of his case. Its shell looked as though it were made of complex crystals of stibnite, and its body reflected harsh flashes of light as it twisted and writhed. A high-pitched sound reverberated through the room as it abruptly snapped its jaws together.

  The worker had heard that such fish could only be reeled in by a hook attached to a metal chain, and to that he could only nod agreement. The chained tendons that extended to its tailfin thrashed about vainly when held down against the lid of the packing case, but once the disassembler had pushed the long rod of his bonedriver in through the gaps in its armor plates to loosen a few of its screwbones, the tendons came loose with a grating sound and then quieted.

  The wide blade of his butcher knife he applied near the fish’s gills, and with a scattering of sparks and an eruption of steam and bodily fluids, he lopped off its head straightaway. As the fallen, armored head went clattering across the grated floor, the disassembler lifted the fish’s tailfin and hung it from the shelf so that the cut surface faced a tubelike glass container positioned directly underneath it. The high-viscosity body fluid used as bait began dripping into it.

  One after another, the disassembler butchered his placoderms and hung them from the shelf. When he was finished with them all, he turned a sweaty face toward the president and asked for his signature on the statement of delivery/completion-of-work report. As he did so, he shrank backward, however.