Re: YOUR HEPER HUNT LOTTERY NUMBERS
And these are my numbers: 3 16 72 87.
I couldn’t care less.
Everyone shoots off their numbers to one another. Within a minute, we realize that the first number in the sequence ranges from only 1 to 9; the remaining three numbers in the sequence range from 0 to 99. A meaningless tally over the first number is drawn up on the blackboard:
Irrational theories are quickly developed. For whatever reason, 4 – being the most common number in our classroom – is surmised as having the best chance of being the first number selected. And 3, with only one hit – me – is quickly dismissed as having no chance.
All fine with me.
It’s dark when I arrive home, a hint of grey smearing the sky. In another hour, the morning sun will peek over the distant mountains to the east. A siren will sound; anyone outside will have only five minutes to find shelter before the sun’s rays turn lethal. But it’s rare for anyone to be outside by that point. Fear of the sun ensures that by the time the sirens sound, the streets are empty and windows shuttered.
As I slip my key into the keyhole, I suddenly sense something is off. A fragrance? I can’t put my finger on it. I scan the driveway and streets. Other than a few horse-drawn carriages hurrying home, no one’s around. I sniff the air, wondering if I imagined it.
Somebody was just here. A few moments before I arrived.
I live alone. I have never invited anyone here. Other than me, nobody has even stood at the front door before. Until today.
Cautiously, I make my way around the perimeter of the house, looking for signs of disturbance. Everything looks fine. The stockpile of cash left by my father and secreted in the floor boards, though slowly diminishing, is untouched.
Closing the front door, I stand listening in the darkness of my home. No one else in here. Whoever was standing outside never came in. Only then do I light the candles. Colours break out.
This is my favourite time of day. When I feel like a prisoner taking his first steps of freedom or a diver rising from the depths of the mythical sea, drawing in his first gasps of air. This is the moment, after the endless grey-black hours of night, I see colour again. Under the flickering light of the candle, colours burst into being, flooding the room with pools of melted rainbows.
I put dinner in the microwave. I have to cook it twenty times, because the timer only goes up to fifteen seconds. Hot, slightly charred, is my preference, not the tepid, soppy mess I’m forced to eat outside. I remove my fangs, place them in my pocket. Then I bite into the burger, relishing the heat as it attacks my teeth, savouring the solid feel of charred crispiness. I close my eyes in enjoyment.
And feel dirty, ashamed.
After my shower – showering is this thing you do where you rub gobs of hand sanitiser and pour water over your body to get rid of odour – I lie on the sofa, my head propped up on folded sweatshirts. Only one candle is alight; it casts flickering shadows on the ceiling. Sleep-holds dangle above me, placed there years ago merely for show on the off chance a visitor might drop by. The radio is on, the volume set low. “Many experts are speculating that the number of hepers will be in the range of three to five,” the radio analyst says. “But because the Director was silent on this issue, there really is no way of knowing.”
The radio programme continues, with a few callers chiming in, including a crotchety woman who speculates that the whole thing is rigged: the “winner” will end up being someone with deep pockets and close friends in high places. Her call is suddenly cut off. Other callers weigh in about the number of hepers in the Hunt this time. Only one thing is for certain: it has to be at least two, because the Director – in a voice loop that has been played over and over – used the plural tense: hepers.
I listen to a few more callers, then get up and switch off the radio. In the quiet that follows, I hear the gentle pit-pat of rain on the shutters.
My father sometimes took me out in the daytime. Except for the times he took me swimming, I hated going outside. Even with sunglasses, the brightness was overwhelming. The burning sun was like an unblinking eye, spilling light like acid out of a beaker, turning the city into an endless flash. Nothing moved out there.
He would take me to empty sports stadiums and vacant shopping malls. Nothing was locked, because sunlight provided the best security. We’d have the whole Core Park to fly kites or the empty public pool to swim in. He told me this ability to withstand sun rays was a strength, made us superpowerful. We can withstand what kills them. But to me, it was only something that made us different, not stronger. I wanted to be like everyone else, cocooned in the dome of darkness that was home. Blackness comforted me. It hurt my father to hear that, but he didn’t say anything. Gradually, we stopped going out.
Except when a certain awful need hit us.
Like right now. I open the door. The rain has stopped.
I venture out.
The city is fast asleep behind shuttered husks of darkness. I “borrow” a horse from a neighbouring yard and ride down empty streets under an overcast sky.
I head out today because every few weeks I get the urge. When my father was alive, we’d venture out together. The shame was mutual because we’d never speak, wouldn’t even look each other in the eye. We went far, past the city borders, to the Vast Lands of Uncertain End. That’s a mouthful, and most people simply call it the Vast. It’s an endless stretch of desert plains. Nobody knows how far it goes or what lies beyond it.
Because I live in the outer suburbs, far from the tall office buildings of the Financial District and farther yet from the centre of the metropolis where towering governmental skyscrapers clutter the landscape, it doesn’t take long before the city is well behind me. The city boundary is vague: there’s no wall to demarcate the beginning of the Vast. It arrives indiscernibly. Scattered homes give way to dilapidated poultry farms, which in turn cede to crumbling shacks long ago abandoned. Eventually, it’s just the spread of empty land. The Vast. There’s nothing out there. No place to flee. Only the cruellest of elements, the three Ds: desert, desolation, and death. There’s no escape for us out here, my father would say, no sanctuary, no hope, no life for us at all. Don’t ever come out here thinking there’s escape to be had.
I don’t dilly-dally out here but head north. About an hour out, an isolated mound of soft green fuzz sits there in the middle of the Vast, an aberrational oddity discovered years ago by my parents. And what I need is in the green fuzz. By the time my feet hit the soft grass, I’m sprinting towards a glade of trees. I reach for a red fruit hanging off a branch. I tear it off, shut my eyes, and sink my teeth through the skin. The fruit crunches in my mouth, watery and sweet, my jaws working up and down, up and down. When my father and I ate the fruit, we’d eat with our backs to each other. We were ashamed, even as we chewed, bite after bite, juice running down our chins, unable to stop.
After my fourth fruit, I force myself to slow down. I pluck away at the different offerings of fruit, tossing them into a bag. I pause for a minute, gazing up at the sky. High above me, a large bird glides across the sky, its wings oddly rectangular. It circles around me, its form strangely unchanging, then heads east, disappearing into the distance. I pick a few more fruit, then head over to our favourite spot, a large tree whose leaves spread lush and high. My father and I always sat under this tree, munching fruit, back against the trunk, the city in the far distance, darkened and flat. Like a dirty puddle.
Years ago, we would explore the green fuzz for signs of others like us. Signs like rutted cores of discarded fruit, trampled grass, snapped branches. But we almost never found anything. Our kind was careful not to leave any giveaway signs. Even so, I’d occasionally find that unavoidable and clearest of signs: less fruit on trees. That meant others had been there as well, plucking and eating. But I never saw any of them.
Once, between bites, I asked my father, “Why don’t we ever see other hepers here?”
He stopped chewing, half turned his
head towards me. “Don’t use that word.”
“What word? Heper? What’s wrong with—”
“Don’t use that word,” he said sternly. “I don’t want to hear that word coming out of you ever again.”
I was young; tears rushed to my eyes. He turned fully towards me, his large eyes swallowing me whole. I tilted my head back to keep the tears from rimming out. Only after my tears dried did he turn his eyes away. He gazed afar at the horizon until the rocks stopped churning inside him.
“Human,” he finally said, his voice softer. “When we’re alone, use that word, OK?”
“OK,” I said. And after a moment, I asked him, “Why don’t we see other humans?”
He didn’t answer. But I can still remember the sound as he bit off large chunks of apple, loud crunches exploding in his mouth as we sat under a tree drooping with ripe fruit.
And now, years later, there’s even more fruit hanging off the trees, an overabundance of colour in the verdant green fuzz. So sad, to have colours signify death and extinction. And that’s how I eat now, alone in the green fuzz, a solitary grey dot among splashes of red and orange and yellow and purple.
Dusk arrives, the night of the lottery. Inside every home, young and old are awake, jittery with excitement. When the night horn sounds, shutters and grates rise, doors and windows fling open. Everyone is early to work and school tonight, to chit-chat and tap impatiently on computer screens before them.