Sophia Kahn

It is a bright hot day in July and the clocks have ceased to strike. It is hot when you open your eyes and it is hot when you close them. Sometimes, it is night. To the children of the moonless era, time is immaterial. They sleep when they’re tired, they eat when there’s food and they come to me when they want a story. In exchange for my tales, they offer bits of vegetation, partially mauled rodents or pretty rocks. Although I am infinitely older and know infinitely more, the children pity me. My skin, charred and ulcerated from brief forays beyond the cave, must seem monstrous beside their own softly glowing blue. Sometimes the gentler ones press me with lichens or lick at my wounds. Sometimes, they bite.

Today, I have chosen four artifacts for them. The stories they like most are about the end of the world. After all, they were not around to see it. I cannot say how long ago they were born (or created? hatched, perhaps, in a lab?), but when the first showed up seven hundred sunsets ago the largest was about the size of a seven-year-old. Certainly, they were not around to witness the moonship launch from orbit, to experience the gentle warmth of sunshine filtered through layers of ozone. They chitter with excitement when I tell them how seas rose and governments fell, how the great smog settled over the earth and life twinkled out of existence. To them, none of it is real. As far as I know, this endless, arid plain is all they’ve ever known. They made their way here, to my part of it, not long after day and night became erratic. They remain for the trickle of the once-great river, for the hunting along its shores, for the decrepit malang who tells them strange stories of lives they’ll never know.

 I smooth out the recipe for chipkali soup and place it by the hearth. I polish the moon pilot’s badge—just a replicant medal intended as a child’s plaything, but they needn’t know that—and set it atop the clipping. The shard of superglass is risky given the children’s propensity to violence, but after all these years the edges are blunted and the integrity has been compromised by heat. They will enjoy seeing how it explodes into colour when held up to the light. I add it to the pile. The last item is a holographic image depicting a man and a tortoise engaged in an unspeakable act. It has been a lifetime since I’ve seen anything larger than a mongoose. They’re bound to be fascinated by the great flippers swaying slowly back and forth.

Ng arrives first. As far as I can tell, the children do not have names, but “ng” is a noise he often emits so that is what I call him. He is immediately taken by the recipe. It is on paper, after all, which was all but impossible to scavenge even before capricious daytimes tethered me to the cave. Ng licks the recipe. His luminescence grows subtly more intense. Um bounds in and tackles him, perhaps inferring he is about to eat it. She boxes him about the ears as the children behind her dance and cackle. Ng seizes a rock and clips her hard above the eye. If the children bleed, I’ve never seen it.

Um goes for Ng’s ear, gnashing away like a puppy with a slipper. When, finally, she lets go, she spits a piece of him into her hand. She shows us the little scrap, still glowing slightly, and pops it into her mouth. Ng will be a part of her now. He’ll go anywhere she goes.

“Um,” she says, holding up the holograph. It is printed on plastic and, therefore, immune to the children’s appetites. They eat carrion and trash and, occasionally, each other, but they draw the line at plastic. 

“Um,” agree the other four children.

Ng rubs his ear sullenly but does not raise his name. The lobe, I notice, is already beginning to regenerate. I hold out a hand and he scampers over to nuzzle my armpit, growling softly as he tongues the tangled hair. Um plants herself imperiously in my lap and the other children fan out on their stomachs, their little faces ultramarine in the quickly fading light.

“A good choice,” I tell them, patting the smallest one’s tangled curls. “Here we have Junaid and Jamshed.” Um holds up the picture obligingly. In another life, she might have been teacher’s pet. “Once upon a time, Jamshed was the most famous tortoise in the world. And once upon a time, Junaid was his dearest friend.”

Two of the children on the cave floor make a noise that sounds like a snicker and begin to engage in the act depicted in the illustration. Ng ceases grooming me to kick them viciously. Um has always hated interruptions. They whimper but fall still, attentive once again. I never know how many of my words the children truly understand, but language seems to soothe them. For these brief, stolen moments, my squalid cave is a schoolroom and, I, it’s master. When I’m telling stories, it matters little that this world is already over and I’m the last of my kind. I’m transported back to the time of my tales’ unfolding, a time of unending disaster, yes, but a time when our lives were still our lives.

“When I first heard about Junaid and Jamshed, I was no more than a child--if alas too stolid of one to avail of their findings. For weeks, the entire country had been rivetted by the manhunt: a scientist and a tortoise gone on the lamb. Imagine the bar jokes on that one—though of course there were no bars and purveying alcohol had long since been made a capital offense.”

Um growls quietly and nips my ear. She’s a stickler for staying on topic, that one.

 “All right, sweet children, all right. Tonight, we have The Story of Junaid and Jamshed or How the World Ends # 485.”

One of the children on the floor—the one with matted hair to her knees, whom I call Jug—rises and etches a line onto the wall. Although I can no longer see well enough to know whether their count is accurate, the children perform this ritual with great solemnity. Jug lies back down at my feet, baring her teeth. I continue.

Junaid and Jamshed were already long gone by the time their world ended. Their vacant bodies didn’t tremble at the sound of mortar fire, didn’t bleed as shrapnel and falling debris pierced their skins. When the soldiers finally dug them out, Junaid was exsanguinated, his body, like Jamshed’s, an emptied shell. Newspapers made much of the fact that the nation’s most despised scientist and his lifelong companion, the nation’s most infamous tortoise, appeared to have departed in the same unholy solitude that started them down along their impious path. Scientists shook their heads and double checked their findings against the holy book, obfuscating as necessary so nothing would contradict the rigid new translation that was the nation’s unofficial constitution. Disgraceful, they declared in public, for a man of science to have strayed so far into the realm of fantasy. Tragic, they whispered in private, for a colleague to have come to such an ignominious end. That one of the most venerated scientists the nation had ever produced ended up an emaciated corpse in a half-collapsed shack shook them so hard they felt it in their molars. No one likes to be reminded that there is always, always, further to fall.

To properly explain how Junaid and Jamshed stumbled into their particular abyss we must retrace our way back from the guerrilla laboratory in the mountains, through the months in a nameless prison, across the years during which religion slowly eclipsed science and Junaid’s reality eclipsed his ideals, back and back through the years of acclaim, the love of a wife, children, the prodigious academic career, the promising adolescence and the utterly unpromising childhood, the early orphanhood, and all the way back to that long ago day when a lonely little boy fell in love with a tortoise.

The world already had begun to end but only scientists were sure of it. Middleclass families like Junaid’s could still enjoy weekends by the ocean without worrying about how much longer they had until it rose up to claim them. As it happened, it would prove the last holiday they took as a family. By the summer’s end both his parents would be gone, victims of one of the early plagues. It was both the first and last time Junaid ever saw the ocean and it wasn’t until years later that he realized how anomalous it had been to find a tortoise on a beach. He lost count of the number of times he wished he’d asked Jamshed how he’d come to be strolling along the coast and came to think of their meeting as purely providential: a boy needed a friend, a tortoise needed a home and the universe sometimes meets our needs by the most mysterious of means.

In the aftermath of his parents’ death Jamshed was the only living creature to whom Junaid ever uttered a word. For years, he skulked about his uncle’s house in utter silence, not emitting a sound, not even when his cousins’ fists rained down upon him in the night. They might have assumed the boy was dumb and left it at that were it not for the murmurs that came from his room when he imagined no one could hear. He was talking to the tortoise, pausing between sentences as though the creature could answer back. There was something strange about a boy who wouldn’t speak except to a tortoise and children are brutal when confronted with the strange.

Junaid found no mercy at school, where the combination of his silence and academic incompetence aroused the ire of teachers and students alike. Then, around the age of twelve, he suddenly started speaking, started taking his school work seriously and reading and rereading every book for which he could bring himself to ask. Who knows why these things happen? Perhaps one of his teachers was particularly inspiring. Perhaps he aged out of imagination. Perhaps it was because, by then, plague orphans were common enough to have formed a tribe of sorts at school and an elfin girl called Asma believed him when he said his tortoise talked. Perhaps it was because when he introduced them, Jamshed clamped shut his jaws and never spoke again and Asma, beautiful Asma, didn’t speak to him again, either.

Jug mewls pathetically—at my words or at my tone, I do not know. The children have crept up my legs to suckle at the cancers. I’ve long since ceased to wonder whether they do this for sustenance or succour. If they are capable of noticing, they will have noticed how difficult it has grown for me to drag myself to the stream each brief and fleeting night. Will they mourn me when I’m gone?  

“There, there,” I say. “Whatever it was, Junaid became determined to become a scientist and, without very much fuss, he quickly did.”

I tell them how Junaid completed his graduate work at an age that made the word prodigy (or, at the very least, savant) flit across people’s minds, returning to a position in a prestigious laboratory before anyone had time to reconcile the stuttering, bespectacled boy to the confident young man who rattled off impossible complexities during dinner without for a moment suspecting none of the other diners were in the least interested. Except, that is, for Asma whose guilt over her little-girl spite bloomed anew when she inferred that Junaid really was close to being able to confer with animals and his findings really were held in high regard by the people to whom such findings matter.

The animals, by then, were dying off in droves. They appeared to be committing suicide. With the plagues and the heat and the bad air, things didn’t look good for the future of planet earth but it still didn’t explain why millions of animals with habitats still mostly intact had pitched themselves over cliffs, drowned themselves in lakes, swarmed power plants or eaten toxic plants their species had never before been known to ingest. Junaid believed that understanding the animals’ behaviour was the key to understanding what lay ahead for humankind. If only they could speak to them, they might understand why they were eliminating themselves in such precise percentages and configurations.

Over dessert, Asma asked Junaid if Jamshed really used to talk to him. He considered her carefully and made a decision he would come to regret. ‘As a boy I had a very vivid imagination,’ he said.

Six months later they were married. Six years later they had three sons, a house in the city and a summer cottage in the hills. Junaid was heading his own laboratory and speaking at conferences around the world. His picture was in the paper several times a month although by then, of course, there was no more actual, physical paper because all the trees were dead.

“This is paper,” I tell them, holding up the recipe Ng tried to eat. “Made from trees. Trees are…” How to explain the majesty of trees to the denizens of a dead world? I never saw a live one but, even so, when I first saw those great leafless spires rising from the earth itself how it made my heart quake.

Flup, who has been lapping away beside Jug, nips me hard enough to draw blood. For weeks, I’ve felt little below the waist. I take a moment to prod the new wound. Nothing. I’m torn between gratitude and fear. The children cease their ministrations to look up at me with…what? Impatience? Adoration? Hunger? It’s hard to say.

Junaid and his team came up with a device—a sort of headset—which allowed them to hear the thoughts of animals, I tell them. The only trouble was not even the team of linguists that they’d assembled, which included some of the best and brightest in the world, could quite parse those thoughts. Junaid himself would often stay up all night connected to Jamshed but the once loquacious tortoise’s thoughts rolled across his mind, untranslatable as the pitter patter of rainfall or the undulation of waves.’ Or the thoughts of you new, blue children, human in aspect if not in action, I do not add.

The years went on and governments, as they do, rose and fell and rose again. It was impossible now to deny the planet was in its death knell and all over the world people were turning toward higher powers for answers. Junaid’s funding was cut, then cut again. A section of the building in which his laboratory was housed was requisitioned as a seminary. Overnight, his colleagues began sprouting beards.

It was at this point that I would imagine Asma first suggested leaving. The boys were in bed and the house sang with rare silence when she mentioned, rather nervously, that it was time they perhaps, maybe, conceivably, perhaps considered Dr Iqbal’s offer of a position overseas. Junaid’s mentor had fled the country shortly religiosity swept the nation and weekends changed back to Friday/Saturday. He had been prevailing upon Junaid to join him ever since.

‘You spoke to Dr Iqbal?’ asked Junaid peevishly. He had been listening to Jamshed’s thoughts (they were green, mostly) all evening. Jamshed now spent most of his time in the terrarium on the terrace, but sometimes he would wander in and look at Junaid expectantly until his old friend donned the earphones. Junaid’s ears ached from pressing down on the headset. Asma had once asked if he thought shutting out one world would allow him access to another. She sighed and twisted her scarf between her fingers. It was strange to see her so fully covered. When had religion crept into their bedroom?

In her conversation with Dr Iqbal, which was replayed endlessly after Junaid and Jamshed went on the run, Asma sounds far less frightened than she must have been. She tells the old scientist that Junaid’s work will bear scrutiny. Her husband has done nothing wrong. It’s Dr Iqbal who sounds like he’s dancing on razorblades. The Parkinson’s was not by then advanced enough to explain the quiver in his voice. In the end, it matters little. Even if Junaid could’ve guessed the implications of his work back then, he was not about to stop. As he must have explained to Asma, the work he had been doing was on the verge of unravelling one of the greatest scientific mysteries of their time. How could he abandon it? If the animals were culling their populations in order to somehow save their species, what if humanity could be saved too?’

Junaid’s wife, it has been noted, was every bit as hostile to the idea of a culling as the authorities. Even if she did not believe, exactly, that we are all god’s creatures, she’d seen enough death in her lifetime not to want to see more. Perhaps it was the possibility of her sons being spared that made her stay. Perhaps on some level she agreed with Junaid that holding fast to faith in the benevolence of a higher power was all very well and good as a strategy to keep the masses from panicking but that if humanity was to survive, it would have to be because we discovered benevolence within ourselves. Whatever the case, she told him he had six months and that was that.

As it happened, six months proved rather too optimistic a timeframe. Four days after Junaid and Asma’s conversation all the institutions of higher learning in the country were permanently shuttered. Bookstores were ransacked, inventories burned. Within a month, free media was a thing of the past and anyone caught using the internet in unsanctioned ways was executed without trial. Junaid began spiriting away equipment, setting up a secondary laboratory in the summer cottage. He was no longer receiving a salary and he’d had to let his team go. By the time the men came to question him there was little to find. He answered their questions calmly (pedantically, they thought) as the immense tortoise blinked at them blandly (insolently, they thought). The whole business had the air of being somehow wrong.

It was a bit of good fortune for Junaid that there had recently been global outcry after a geneticist with brash ideas about how evolution could no longer be left to nature if humankind was to survive was publicly stoned. His execution had closely followed the assassination of a promising engineering student who had proposed equipping the moon as a ship and deserting their God-given planet. The science world could ill afford another scandal. Lacking evidence of any malfeasance, the authorities reluctantly released Junaid. Convinced his time was fast running out, he buried himself in his work as never before.

When Junaid ceased answering the telephone, scientists from around the country began calling Asma to tell her they feared for Junaid’s life. Strange stories were circulating about him. Asma begged Junaid to reconsider--even going so far as to ask Dr Iqbal to intervene--but her husband wouldn’t hear of it. When their eldest boy was beaten senseless at school one day a glimmer of remorse flashed over his face and for a second Asma’s heart soared but, in the end, Junaid just said, ‘Teach them at home. Jamshed and I are close.’

It was around that time that the cartoons began circling: lewd illustrations depicting the scientist and the tortoise engaging in experimentation of wholly unscientific sort. Asma was horrified but Junaid just laughed.

‘Their tactics show a profound lack of imagination,’ he said. Later that night though he shook Asma awake. ‘If anything happens to me you have to make sure Jamshed is taken care of.’

Asma was instantaneously awake. ‘If anything happens to you what about your wife and children?’

The next morning, she phoned Dr Iqbal and took her jewellery out of the safe. Junaid would’ve returned that evening to an empty house only he never did return that evening. Instead of going to the laboratory, he drove up to the summer cottage, Jamshed riding shotgun. The caretaker would keep him safe while Junaid made arrangements for Asma and the boys.

‘Goodbye, old friend,’ he said, kissing the tortoise on its leathery head.

‘Goodbye Junaid,’ said Jamshed. ‘You’re doing the right thing.’

Junaid blinked twice. Jamshed blinked back. Junaid’s phone buzzed angrily in his pocket. When he looked back up, Jamshed had withdrawn into his shell.  

Junaid was just beginning to think that he had, in fact, done the right thing when he came to a checkpoint outside Abbottabad. Though his electric Bolan was empty, evidence was writ all over his face. He never saw Asma or the boys again.

The children at my feet are restive. They don’t like the parts when the heroes are imprisoned, these children who have always been free. So I skip over the dank cell, the beatings and the cigarette burns and all the times Junaid wished that he would drown. Ng nestles sweetly against me, licking my neck. I gloss over Junaid’s unlikely escape, his exhausting voyage and take us back to the mountains, to the dialogue, to where the tortoise and the scientist finally speak again. The children love it when I do voices.

The cottage had been looted. The caretaker was long gone. But there, hiding beneath the house, was the giant tortoise. He crept out when Junaid approached looking as though he’d never had any doubt his old friend would return.

‘How did you survive?’ Junaid asked, reeling, after all those months, at this bit of grace.

To his surprise, Jamshed’s response was clear as anyone’s, even without the headset. ‘I survived because it was necessary.’

‘But all those years. Why didn’t you speak?’

‘Why didn’t you ask me anything interesting?’

Junaid burned with long-forgotten shame. Jamshed had been his friend, his only companion, and he’d used him as a parlour trick to impress a pretty girl. He sat down heavily. Jamshed crept towards him, resting his great head in his lap. For a moment, it was enough.

‘The world is ending, isn’t it?’ Junaid said.

‘Sooner than you think. The seas are dying.’

‘Well,’ said Junaid.

‘Don’t you want to ask me about the animals—about what we know?’

‘What you know?’ Junaid stilled. ‘Why you’re dying, don’t you mean?

‘Where we’re going,’ said Jamshed again. ‘Put on the headset again.’

This time, Junaid saw great steamers pulling out of harbours, rocket ships ascending, mothers kissing small children on the heads and waving to them from behind school gates. He saw immense eel-like creatures, long and red, swimming through fluorescent skies, three headed beings whose mysterious organs glowed through their translucent skin, bright specks of life in a crystalline raindrop the size of his world. He tilted his head back against the side of the cottage and closed his eyes.

‘What was that?’

‘Now we’re speaking.’

‘But what is it I’m seeing?’

‘The universe. The worlds beyond this one.’

‘There is life on other planets?’

‘Life on other planets is a reality all but humans know.’

Junaid must have looked doubtful for when Jamshed spoke it was slowly, as though he were explaining a complicated concept to a child of below-average intelligence. ‘Have you ever seen an animal go perfectly still?’

Junaid clicked his tongue at the obviousness of this.

‘When we go perfectly still, we are travelling. You are too busy building and breaking and acquiring things to be still enough.’

‘When you’re still, you’re still here,’ Junaid pointed out.

‘Think of it like, what do you call them…’

Junaid saw geometric wire bowls of decorative balls, chandeliers dim with Edison bulbs, over-sized white vases containing single stalks of false blooms, mid-century modern sofas in strain-resistant grey.

‘Air BnBs?’ he asked incredulously.

Jamshed nodded. ‘Of the soul. You can exchange with anyone in the universe. But you can’t go unless you’re still.’  

‘Then why isn’t there mass violence, rape or plunder?’

Tortoises can’t roll their eyes, but Junaid felt the gesture deep within him. ‘Because we aren’t human.’  

He considered Jamshed. Their consciousnesses were just so different. Perhaps travel to Jamshed was no more than daydreaming to Junaid. ‘Are we the only ones who don’t know about this travelling?’

‘Some creatures travel always. Some never do. Your language is an encumberment. It prevents you from seeing the world.’ He picked something up in his mouth and passed it to Junaid. ‘What is this? 

‘A leaf?’

‘And?’

‘It’s green. It’s deciduous. It’s tortoise food. It’s half a nibble. It’s dry now because winter’s coming. It’s something in my hand.’

Jamshed laughed. ‘Words! That’s precisely what I meant. And don’t even get me started on synecdoche. Your kind have so many signifiers you no longer know what’s signified. To the rest of us this is what that is. That’s it.’

All at once, the leaf was the sole subject of Junaid’s consciousness. He knew

the taste, the smell, where it was found and what it would feel like between his teeth.

‘If your thinking is so different, why can I talk to you?’

‘It is a language you learned when you were a creature. When humanity overcame you, you forgot. Now that we are nearing the end, the strictures that blinded you are unloosening.’

‘Will you travel somewhere? Now, I mean? Show me.’

‘These days I travel less. It becomes more difficult towards the end of one’s life. If you die in someone else’s body, they are stuck in yours.’

Junaid leapt to his feet, forgetting his broken body. He paced back and forth across the dusty patch that served as garden muttering and gesticulating. He was so distracted by his own excitement that it took some time for Jamshed’s next thoughts to reach him:

‘I can offer you no proof, my friend. You cannot bring things back.’

‘But I could see the process, perhaps even speak to whatever returns. If I could see it happen, perhaps I could understand it. Explain it.’ He squatted to cup the tortoise’s face in his hands. ‘You said you survived because it was necessary. This is why it is necessary, Jamshed. Do you choose where you go?’

‘As you grow more experienced you have more control, but you never exchange thoughts with the being you inhabit. There would be no way for me to ask anyone to speak to you.’

 ‘I couldn’t speak to others?’

‘Monkeys maybe. Pet dogs. Trained dolphins. Not to most. You are too foreign, too wrapped up in words.’ 

‘Then how do creatures know to sacrifice themselves?’

Jamshed shook his head, looking for all the world like an elderly uncle whose clever riddle has, quite unexpectedly, been solved. ‘All consciousnesses are sacred. In the event of an extinction, we have vowed to safeguard those that will not persist. It is something all sentient beings agreed upon at a time before history.’

‘But what of humans?’

It was then Jamshed told Junaid the thing that would forever cement their monstrousness in the eyes of all humanity: ‘Children travel. It’s funny that you worry about their safety. They’ve leapt off cliffs before they can walk. Then you teach them your words and they no longer remember.’

Junaid was silent for a long time. ‘Do you mean to say,’ he finally said, ‘that there is way for their souls to endure?’

Jamshed nodded. ‘Their bodies must be sacrificed but their beings will go on far away from here. They have only to be reminded of that which they’ve always known.’

Junaid and Jamshed found the children remarkably easy to train, though, as a father, Junaid found their deaths difficult to watch. He consoled himself with the surety that the essences of who they were would endure elsewhere. He closely observed the moment when alien consciousness entered the children. It was impossible not to note the profound otherness in their eyes.

In the months to follow, the corpses of mountain children were found drowned in river streams, cast into ravines. Those who couldn’t travel returned to their parents with outlandish tales of a scientist and his tortoise. Despite the internet restrictions, word quickly spread. The plague of child suicides soon extended far beyond the borders of their country. Dogs and drones and special troops sought Junaid and Jamshed, sniffing trails through the hills. The scientist and the tortoise were always one step ahead.

Until they weren’t. 

The children mewl expectantly. ‘That is the end, my friends.’ I tell them. ‘You knew it from the start.’

Jug claws me across the ribs. I fling him off. The children back out snarling. Tonight, all they’ve left for my supper is a dried-up mushroom.

I savour the calories and consider my legs. Soon it will be night, but who knows how long it will last? I wait out the first darkness. It feels like less than an hour. By the second, I’m light headed and my tongue feels like the chalk our teachers used to make us eat when we were rude. I drag myself from the cave. The few steps to the stream are interminable now. It is right there, yet it is an eternity away. I bump into an obstacle that was not there the last time I ventured forth. I run my hands over its face. Jug. Still as stone.

A metre on there is another, rigid and cool with dew. I encounter twelve before I make it to the stream, where I collapse in the cool waters, too grateful for the relief to even think about my return.

I open my eyes to pain. Ng is at my thigh. He tears away at me. I summon the last of my strength to struggle against him, seizing him by the hair. Surely, this cannot be my end?

Um punts Ng in the head. He tumbles through the dust, growling indignantly, before rolling to his feet to stand beside her. She holds up the shard of superglass, sharpened now to a glimmering point. And then I understand. My children, too, will travel. They will take me with them in the only way they know.