Steel Nemesis, Siren, by Phoua Lee
Image by Denys Nevozhai
Sometime after the Praying Mantis Ungod severed Synth’s left arm, we made prank calls on a payphone using coins we picked up on the roadside. I sat knees to my chest and ate ramen from a cup, breathing in caustic engine fumes from zipping-by cars and flicking broth off my plastic fork. We were all unsure about the lives we were living but certain that Ungods were kicking our asses. Micah said I was lucky because I could drop out and work at my family’s restaurant if it got too much. I flipped him off and he dodged to throw away his wrapper. The air was soured with summer grass and hot asphalt, only made bearable with Carlos’ promise of free caprisuns and coupon clippings stolen from discarded mail. Micah bought us all an otter pop because he felt like it and because it was a hell-pit of a night. We ate the icepops the way we promised each other, sucking the juice out before chomping on the ice.
Carlos’ phone turned our necks blue as he googled local ghost areas. He cursed as a crow swooped low enough to raise goosebumps on his back. Aren’t those motherfucking birds supposed to be sleeping? he asked. It was too late—and stupid—to do anything so we headed home in Micah’s nailpaint-red silverado, Carlos calling shotgun and nearly straddling the console to throw his leg over Micah’s thigh, the two barely able to keep their horniness contained as the night dragged on. The window contained enough darkness to derail a plane, and I felt lonelier than ever. Carlos had Micah’s hair in his grip as he drove, massaging his scalp.
They dropped me off first because I was spending the weekend with my parents. Micah’s truck crouched over my driveway until they were sure I made it to my door. I watched through the sidelight the entire process of their leaving, the reversal, the roar of the engine taking my heartbeat away with it as it prowled down the street.
*
The package truck hit me and my spine snapped in half, and as I lay there, cars speeding past the wreck of my body, I smelled the wet air of March and felt blood crawling down my cheek. I was dying with my innards open for all the world to see. Everything after was about patching, piecing together bits to manufacture humanness, synthetic stitchings and metal soup and a port drilled into the groove of my waist to accelerate indoctrination. I remembered hulls and light panels and a radiant streak of terror, the crimson engine light flickering and dust descending into my hair. And always, cool air seeping into my skin, dragging, dragging, dragging, and my mother’s voice asking whose child are you? among the fields of scattered Ungod corpses, their mega-limbs sunken into buildings like collapsed ships.
On the night a truck careened into my body and snapped me in half like a saltine cracker, I was mostly thinking about my dad and his love for vehicles and what he’d think if he saw me now, crushed under one and breathing fast. After my transformation, I ceased to be a daughter, hiding my eyes behind glossy lenses and headgear to prevent my skull getting crushed like a bottle cap, my heart growing cold as the titanium that encased my body. Forgotten family dinner plans. Unanswered phone calls. Everything was a ribbon pulling me away from myself and what I knew of family. I was a sea and I was retreating, but like the sea, I come back and I always come back.
*
Synth says our minds are labyrinthine containers of violence, decades of designs wired to maximize the human potential for destruction. After the war, mostly, we’re bartering with ourselves in the midst of reclamation. I want to heal but to heal means to return to myself before the truck collision, and I don’t recall a time when I wasn't an Ungod slayer. We’re not meant to live forever, but Synth and I are in sync when we say we feel terribly alive, in the sense that we feel burnt out and too human but not enough human all at once, just freaky automaton-like spirits that kept biting until our owners had enough of us. We were disposed of and share an apartment now and can have actual vulnerable moments where we’re allowed to feel fear and excitement and anxiety and hatred, so much hatred at the unfairness of it all: our identities that our menders ripped from our bodies, the blood on us that I can still smell on my neck and behind my ears, my hands that won’t forget how to rip out organs from an Ungod; all that guck and grime carrying me into headspaces that break waves through me, leaving me shuddering and twitching in the husk of my body.
*
Back when we lived in the training dorms, Synth returned from battle with a tear-streaked face. We had rituals for times like this—bathtub soaks and sleeping in one bed. With her face stuck to my neck, she whispered stories of her childhood about a wooden spoon that always tasted like honey and rats that washed out from her shed after every summer rainstorm. Many things about Synth amaze me. I told her this. She hummed into my shoulder and jumped up, insisting on doing something out of character, so we went downstairs to the pool and she rang up her cousin on the phone, sitting enough on the edge to dip her legs in the water and turn them blue. Carlos and Micah joined us and hooted in the background of her call just to be annoying. I’m okay, I told myself, and so is this pool, these fabulous vents shooting warm shafts through the water, these magical lights opening fire on us as we splash water at each other. And even more fun we make to forget the terrors lining our daily lives: karaoke in the training dorms and high-calorie snacks, tea-making sessions where we talk mad shit, bets placed on who can bring back the most Ungod limbs.
I’m glad I can be this—whatever this is—an Ungod slayer, Synth tells me one night despite her hesitation. They owe me this much at least, she said, to let me like girls.
And how lucky are we, at the heart of it all, to keep our bodies?
*
Whiplash-fast. Lair of circuitry holding me up. Beeping machinery. Cosmic surge. So much umbral fission to break me into something new.
Every wound dealt to me, every irradiated bone, is tethering me to this new identity. The magnitude of my being is irregular but nuclear enough to sanction a second life on this earth.
I should be gone—but I sputter blueprints of projected futures and reimagined deaths where I am not roadkill and just a college adult working my movie theater shift having an adult life.
—and totally not a killer.
Basalt-metal glove crushing my wrist into powder. Cerebral chambers. Decomposition of body mass. Diode of trauma-processing. I’m tired of dying and waking up. I want to dissipate.
*
The first time I went home after the procedure, I saw my house clearly, a one-story smelling of lard and canola flowers. A reverse appliqué Hmong tapestry hung on the living room’s left wall. Bird’s eye chili clustered in a bamboo tray by the patio door. I was ambivalent about stepping into this space as an inhabitant. My rewired brain wholly believed I was Ungod slayer and nothing else. My dad was out back repairing a fence after the neighbor’s dog chewed through it, his hammer coming down in well-timed strikes. I could picture him then, sweating in the blistering sun, his work gloves on, his goggles set over his wide nose. I was forgetting myself, but my dad was in glorious cyanotype, perpetual image chained to my nerve endings so I could point him out from my position on any given rooftop even if he was on Jupiter, and I like that, the infinite possibilities of finding my roots and shore.
My clumsy attempts to locate Mom in the house felt like a badly-orchestrated dream, and in her absence, I thought she was manufactured and a figment of my rewired brain, until she stepped through the door, a plastic bag of tangerines in one hand, the handles stretching with weight. You eat yet? she asked in rapid Hmong, her feet roving to find the slippers she always kept under the couch. We moved together to the kitchen where she scrambled eggs, the food fumes claiming her boxy figure under the milky bulb light, and I watched expectantly. We left a plate out for Dad who, after repairing the fence, would be hungry and roaming, and when he popped open a soda, seeing the beckoning hump of scrambled eggs beside the toaster, would breathe in and bless the little fortunes in his family.
Having worked years in food service, the mattress was too soft for the rigidity of her bones, and Mom settled into her floor mattress. I knelt beside her, sneaking my hand into hers as she nodded off to sleep, her blinking eyes so squirrel-like in their luster. We pretended I was the daughter she always wanted even if I had calluses from wielding a hypernova sword and could disembowel an Ungod more neatly than a chicken for a hu plig ceremony. We didn’t think you would come back, Mom said. But we’re glad you did, even if we can’t recognize you anymore. Can you still remember us every Noj Peb Caug? I promise to boil an egg and sing a song to guide you home.
*
It was our second night without food or water.
Synth lay spread-eagled on the floor. On her right hand, I spotted a clean watch, poking out from just beneath her vambrace. Outside, the tentacle Ungod raged on, our mechas forgotten capsules at its feet. Days ago, it had torn us from the bubble of our hatches using suction any normal octopus would have, only a thousand times more potent, which I felt was unfair. The Ungod flung me, and I crashed into a parking garage, limbs wedged between car parts. A seatbelt across my forehead. A tire biting into my back.
My communicator beeped.
“I’m out of the burrow. Unprotected. It snatched and threw me out. Over.” Synth.
I brought the radio to my lips. “Same here. I’m in the parking garage southwest of the jackass. Not stuck, just demoralized.”
That squeezed a laugh from Synth. “On my way. We’ll have to ride this one out until the recovery team gets here. It’s too dangerous to go anywhere else. The monster’s caught our scent and no one’s around for miles.”
“Good for us. The garage is out of range.”
Now, we were stuck with each other. Synth was getting increasingly worried about her greasy hair, and my stomach kept lurching. But we’d been trained to ignore our hunger, so it was trivial to me.
“How long do you think it’ll take them?” she asked, then grunted. “Ugh, my hair.”
I kicked her helmet to her hip. “Put it back on. And your gloves too.”
Nothing ever seemed real to her. Not the drills, not the rules. That’s why she was always the one spitting blood into the sink afterward, nose crooked, eye swelling shut, even when our task was something as harmless as counting Ungod eggs.
“Do you think it’ll come after us once it’s done King-Konging the buildings?”
My fingers crept to my belt. Relief filled my veins once I located the ridge of a syringe. If it came to it, I could plunge it into an Ungod and render the creature helpless for five precious minutes. Awfully short, but every second counts. Plus, Synth had a copy. That made it—what? Ten minutes, tops, if we managed our time right.
Late at night, the birds arrived to pick on the carcasses outside our hideout. In the distance, the Ungod’s bulk cut the sky like a jagged mountain. Synth, bored, kicked an engine part around the lot.
Years ago, during a trial in a whiteout snowstorm, we hunted Ungods through the drifts. Starved and with life or death breathing in my face, I learned a trick where if I pressed my stomach at the right angle, it would quiet. But here in this garage, no matter what I did, the hunger drained me.
Any moment now I thought our instructors would emerge from a dark corner, clap, and tell Synth that we made it, we passed the attrition test and could return to our dorms after the finest meal in the dining hall to congratulate our achievement. Maybe we were on some freak reality TV show where they pitched Ungod slayers into the most trauma-inducing situations, then drew the curtains and it turned out we were on a set the whole time. Turns out it was my dehydration talking.
“You’re thinking too loud,” Synth groaned, sitting half-up. “I’m beginning to regret this. I just became a slayer so I could get out of high school, but math exams are way better than some bullshit monster scenting you so it can find your house and hold your family hostage.”
“Exaggerations. You’re great at them. Plus, what family?”
“You’re right. I don’t actually remember what my parents look like.”
It was part of the program. It made fighting easier when we didn’t have emotional ties.
“My family didn’t want me. I know that much,” I shared.
Synth wrinkled her nose. “Well, that’s…sunny.”
“You think I’m a downer?”
“I didn’t say that.”
I thought about the word privilege, and about how even though I loved Synth a lot and she had her own share of problems, she could be awfully dismissive.
I said, “I’m going to ignore you now—”
“What did I say to garner this reaction?”
“Ignore.”
“We should talk this out.”
I looked her in the eye. “I have a proposal. I think we should book it. There’s no telling when the Ungod will circle, and we’ll be dead meat if it does.”
“Think again. There’s not a single city for miles. Miles.” Synth frowned, tapping her fingers on her thigh.
I fumbled with my belt, trying to yank free the radio and get a signal to the main base. My fingers slipped and the syringe tumbled out, shattering across the floor. Shit. I knotted my fingers in my hair and pulled. Synth watched me, worried.
“Give me your syringe. I’ll leave and get help.” I shook my hand at her.
“No,” she stated.
“Clearly, I’m the only person here willing to make active choices.”
“And my active choice is saying no to you. If I wait for you and the Ungod circles back, how will I defend myself?”
So I did what any smart Ungod Slayer pressed for time would do: I drew my knife and sliced her fingers off—right above her knuckles—where she was propping herself on the floor with one hand, the blade cracking down the bone and scraping against concrete.
Synth roared.
She cradled what was left of her hand to her chest, using the hem of her shirt to stem the blood loss. With her other hand, she scrambled for blood-clotting meds, her breath whistling out like a beaten kitten.
“Tourniquet,” she begged, fingers blanching where they gripped her wrist.
Curling my lip in disgust, I unpeeled her severed fingers from the ground and retrieved the syringe. Her shoulders trembled, and the tremor answered in my own hands. That I could perform such a grotesque act on my friend made me sick, but survival has no loyalty. Would the Ungod, looking down on my battered body, spare me death because of how many friends I had?
Sensing that we had run out of goodwill, Synth lunged, curling her good arm around my neck and using her weight to topple us backward. The syringe flew out of my grasp and disappeared into a dark corner. I dug my nails into her wrist and tugged. I tried to break free, but she had already shifted her body in front of me, straddling my chest, knees pinning me. Don’t panic, don’t panic.
Her fist cracked into my jaw, and I retaliated with an elbow strike to her stomach. For a heartbeat, our hands were a blur, pinching and yanking, wrestling for control that neither of us wanted to surrender. I jabbed my knee up, and she hissed, a flicker of surprise contorting her features. It was enough to knock her off balance, and I went with the momentum, rolling on top of her and landing punch after punch.
The sound of skin on skin matched my heartbeat, the rush of it invading my ears and I couldn’t think about anything else but how much blood I could draw from her. How many hits can she take? Five, six seven…
Her head spun to the side. “I hate you,” she cried, spitting out a wad of blood and one tooth. “I can’t take anymore. Please, we’re friends. Please.” She caught my next punch. “We killed a jellyfish Ungod together. Remember the sting welts that didn’t disappear from our backs for weeks?”
Outside, a whirring sound grew deafening until it hovered outside our building, our floor inundated with light. A helicopter. They had sent a helicopter for us.
A surge of panic twisted my insides into a crushed can. What would they think if they saw me over her like this, her blood on my fists, the bruises around her eye? I would be no better than an Ungod. A monster to kill.
Synth whimpered, curling herself into a ball.
“Shut up,” I told her. “They’ll grow your fingers back.”
Then we would forgive each other. We always did.
*
Before the truck destroyed my insides: The door slamming, the cups thrown at me and YOU CAN’T BE GAY. The bus I take from Point A to Motel Get-Away-From-Your-Family. The umbrella beside the door. My luggage still packed in case I wanted to go back and apologize. I ate vending machine drumsticks on a bench overlooking a street of trendy restaurants. The meat was chewy. I was annoyed. I couldn’t imagine any future where I could be happy. My brother found me between two buckwheat bushes, his phone balanced on his palm, beeping my location that I shared with him. He sat on the patch of dirt next to me and offered me a gum stick.
Back at my motel room, we checked the nooks for cameras. To our amusement, we found guitar strings and a chocolate bar in the closet. My brother toppled over onto the only bed and studied the ceiling, the peeling popcorn paint. I asked him why he came, and he said he needed to have some form of an answer for our parents by the end of his visit. Would they be glad to know I wasn’t in a snakepit somewhere? Yes. Were they ready to see me? No. He looked like a knife on my bed. I turned my head away. You know, Mom always said you were siab loj but I think she misevaluated you, he said. I started to unpack: toothpaste, comb, deodorant. I considered the cons of hitchhiking. My brother walked around the room until he got distracted by the induction stove. Outside the window, I watched two cats chase each other. Maybe estrangement was just a myth, and relationships were like Newton’s cradle, spheres torn away and, inevitably, returning to each other. I didn’t want to talk about myself so we talked about him. He was enjoying his new job but hated how all his coworkers were fucking each other.
I wanted to ask him if he was disgusted by me but it all got lost under his spiel about nonslip shoes. It was important. I had to know if I had someone on my side. He started talking about sleeping open-mouthed, then stupid dad jokes he couldn’t get out of his head. I plucked the little hairs on his arm. He wiggled like he had been shocked, shot out a finger to poke my side fast. I pinched the underside of his arm where it hurt and he hissed. I miss you, he said, I miss eating garden worms with you. I felt delightedly daisy-headed hearing it from him in this moment when I was living on one duffel bag and a few hundred bucks for travel, with no clue of where I was headed or where to head.
We killed the lights and started pointing out stuff in the dark using the outlines of inanimate objects. That one’s a seagull snatching an egg salad sandwich. That one’s an indecipherable tentacle monster causing a traffic jam because he’s searching the universe for his better half who is a sentient milk carton. That one’s Mom. She’s crying with her head out the bedroom window and below her are two tiny mice who have discovered a tiny hole leading outside the house and see that?—they’re turned the opposite direction. They’re not looking back.
*
The day they released us as normal, re-integrated humans, I took my helmet with me. I didn’t take it off until my third week of discharge, when my mom asked me if I was in there somewhere underneath all the metal.
*
I meet an Ungod covered in factory ash. I swing my fist at the indigo blooming at the center of its forehead, scrap metal raining around my engine body. Its skull opens up like a book, unveiling clockwork of gears, breathing in the corroded fiber of my dread. In another lifetime, I want to be more than metal bits and closer to wholeness, sure-footed and sitting in theaters, comfortable with the dark enough to see a movie through to the end. Through this violet pinpoint, diluted pseudo-admiration. Through the mirror-like Ungod eye, Carlos and Micah long-throw a foam football, lay pennies on a train track, and in the final act, peel off their faces to uncover gaping android pupils. We pine for our bodies. Badly. Our survival hinges on the worth of our violence. I listen for my magnetic pulse but all I hear is the pinprick of mechanical decay.
*
Disclaimer: The following is a standardized assessment designed to evaluate the examinee’s integration into society, measuring behavior, emotional intelligence, and logical patterns. Please note that this exam is being monitored, and any behavioral anomaly will be reported and recorded. By continuing, you acknowledge that you are responsible for any discomfort or distress. You are to blame.
1) Are you alive?
__ I exist. That is enough.
2) There is a circus tent, and you are stuffed into the mouth of a stunt cannon. How do you picture yourself escaping this predicament?
__ At a sleepover, my friend waited until I had fallen asleep before peeling back my covers and shining a flashlight in my face. It was a meaningless prank, only I wasn’t actually sleeping, and the fun was cut short when she discovered my hand down the front of my underwear. I was horrified. I pinched the blanket over myself and heard her leave the room. One phone call later, my parents were in the front yard. My mom smacked me on the head, her palm branding me a whore, and asked if that’s what all my piano lessons were going toward, and why didn’t I wear a bra around the house with my dad and my brother?
3) Scenario Cataclysmic: In the rare event you are a human girl with no Ungod slayer powers and take the late night bus home, the outskirts scrolling past the windows, the crunch of your boots as you exit your last stop, the pancake truck still open for one last customer—a role you dutifully fulfill as you balance a quarter between your lips and shift through bills—the bread melting on your mouth as you walk the rest of the way home, the buttered scent of it melding with your mom’s fish mint as you finally find yourself at the porch next to the dirt patch where your brother once buried a mango seed, how do you imagine your family welcoming you back?
__ My family throws a grill party complete with a jello pool and ask “where’s your partner?” and “we’d love to meet him” and he walks onto the scene like the intro for a game show contestant, my partner—who is the perfect amalgamation of marriage suitor; handsome height and confidence-contagious—is also an autopsy of heteronormativity, a tailored ghost greeting partygoers to and fro. The lemonade sweetens, molders my throat, sticks like the little secrets I’m so desperate to unclog. “Show them the bathing suit, babe,” he says, tugging at my shirt, and tosses me into the jello pool, and with my plunge, the gelatinous cubes transform into pigeons who fly away, leaving me a lone figure at the pool’s bottom, blinking slowly in place. “It was a joke, babe, where’s your humor? Can’t a girl laugh?” he pokes, hauling me by my wrist from the depths, laughing upon his discovery of a jello scab on my shoulder, imprinting his hand there until the jello dissolves into my skin, his touch like warm styrofoam. Everyone’s mirthful. I shouldn’t be such a killjoy. We talk about dowry and bride prices and tshoob procedures, and really, I don’t even know who he is or where he came from, only that it’s making everyone happy and giving them what they need. Relatives predict three babies in four years. My life is a board game. My worth is a throw of dice. I run to the wood fences. I pound until splinters crater my arms.
5) Can you admit that you’re wrong?
__ I refuse to be implicated. I refuse to comment.
*
In the family van, there were Ritz Crackers wrappers and a robin-print quilt pinned to the right back window to filter out the light, caution exercised by my parents in light of my recent eye surgery to fuse new and potent nerves for Ungod detection. They were dealing with me the way one might a new car, like I had buttons with unnamed functions. But really, I knew they just didn’t want me seeing the endless ‘UNGOD WAR IS OVER. EARTH CAN BREATHE AGAIN’ ads floating past on highways and desert roads. For this trip, despite my parents’ pleas, I wore my slayer headgear, a metal block of helmet that signified my status, the deprivation I underwent to serve our society and future. In the hotel lobby, I hissed at the guppies in the wall-mounted fish tank, and the staff promptly showed me to my room. I ignored the pointed and disappointed looks from my parents, thankful for my one-way visor that masked any inkling of embarrassment.
They took me to a local pho party, a grab-and-go buffet style where we stood in line to pour broth over our noodles, then topped off with herbs and condiments. We found an empty picnic table by a folded sidewalk sign advertising sunhat discounts. I watched Mom paddle noodles through her lips, the curl of her mouth and the flop of the broth rolling across her tongue. Dad left the table to buy us water from a vending machine. The coastal breeze nipped my elbow. Across the street, a group of boys was checking out a hibiscus surfboard. When you were younger, she started, I wanted to salt a slug. But you stopped me. You gripped my wrist and wouldn’t let me go. It had eaten my garden cabbages. I wanted to kill that thing, but I knew I had raised a sensible child.
My brother finished off his noodles and fled across the street to join the boys checking out the surfboards. One boy clapped a big hand over his shoulder like they’d been old-time pals, though they’d barely met each other. I couldn’t imagine being that fluid, that easygoing, with a liquidity that could fit me into any social sphere and make me into a friend. The boys’ figures bobbed and merged as they appraised the other goods up for view: sandals, shell necklaces, carefully-branded shot glasses; their golden skin sheening a rice-paper layer of sweat, one boy twisting away to check out his glossy locks in the mounted mirror and throwing on a pair of sunglasses that jounced beneath his eyes. My brother, there he goes, promenading off with the rest of the boys whose collarbones are holding up the horizon, the sun splitting over the knob of their shoulders. It’s not the first time and certainly not the last that my Ungod helmet feels heavy over my head, and Mom’s following my gaze, noticing the boys and all the ways I am not like them. I would kill that slug now. I would do it with my own hands and spill forth the bodily slime from my palms like a micro-waterfall from which the ground-level creatures can gorge and multiply.
*
My wrist, a weapon, a flick to yank out forests of vital alloy wires. The Ungod folds in on itself, shrinks, and crumbles. The dust invades my lungs, and I cough into my sleeve. An endless cycle of killing, I am caged. In my head, there’s Mom, there’s Dad, there’s my brother, and my childhood home, but physically, there’s the grime sticking the folds of my clothes together and the Ungod heads buried in front of an abandoned hospital.
There’s Synth, coming for me now and free-falling through clouds, her body defying strips of wind, her hands latching to my shoulders and ripping me away in a hug, both of us tumbling onto the ground through shards and gutted gears. She pauses to check my face and neck, my shoulders and arms, breathing through her teeth. That’s real. I’m real. She sticks her head to mine, whispers stupid, stupid and we choke back laughs, the smoke from our ruined systems already beginning to rise.
Phoua iLee s a Hmong-American writer whose stories and poems appear or are forthcoming in F(r)iction, Fractured Lit, the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Poets.org, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net, and Best Small Fictions.