Terminal Read Free

discomfort in one’s own life, one’s own skin, a slowly dawning realisation that you have passed like a grey ghost through your own life, leaving no impression, that soon you might fade away entirely, to dust and ash and nothingness, a mild regret in your children’s minds that they never really knew you at all.
    â€œThis is Haziq, C-6173, is there anyone hearing me, my name is Haziq and I am going to Terminal”—and a sudden excitement takes him. “My name is Haziq and I am going to Terminal!” he shouts, and all around him the endless chatter rises, of humans in space, so needy for talk like sustenance, “We’re all going to Terminal!” and Haziq, shy again, says, “Please, is there anyone there, won’t someone talk to me. What is it like, on Terminal?”
    *   *   *
    But that is a question that brings down the silence; it is there in the echoes of words ords rds and in the pauses, in punctuation missing or overstated, in the endless chess moves, worried queries, unwanted confessionals, declarations of love, in this desperate sudden need that binds them together, the swarm, and makes all that has been before become obsolete, lose definition and meaning. For the past is a world one cannot return to, and the future is a world none has seen.
    Mei floats half-asleep half-awake, but the voice awakens her. Why this voice, she never knows, cannot articulate. “Hello. Hello. Hello…” And she swims through the air to the kitchenette and heats up tea and drinks it from the suction cup. There are no fizzy drinks on board the jalopies, the lack of gravity would not separate liquid and gas in the human stomach, and the astronaut would wet-burp vomit. Mei drinks slowly, carefully; all her movements are careful. “Hello?” she says, “Hello, this is Mei in A-3357, this is Mei in A-3357, can you hear me, Haziq, can you hear me?”
    A pause, a micro-silence, the air filled with the hundreds of other conversations through which a voice, his voice, says, “This is Haziq! Hello, A-3357, hello!”
    â€œHello,” Mei says, surprised and strangely happy, and she realises it is the first time she has spoken in three months. “Let me tell you, Haziq,” she says, and her voice is like music between worlds, “let me tell you about Terminal.”
    *   *   *
    It was raining in the city. She had come out of the hospital and looked up at the sky and saw nothing there, no stars no sun, just clouds and smoke and fog. It rained, the rain collected in rainbow puddles in the street, the chemicals inside it painted the world and made it brighter. There was a jalopy vendor on the corner of the street, above his head a promotional video in 3D, and she was drawn to it. The vendor played loud K-pop and the film looped in on itself, but Mei didn’t mind the vendor’s shouts, the smell of acid rain or frying pork sticks and garlic or the music’s beat which rolled on like thunder. Mei stood and rested against the stand and watched the video play. The vendor gave her glasses, embossed with the jalopy sub-agent’s logo. She watched the swarm like a majestic silver web spread out across space, hurtling (or so it seemed) from Earth to Mars. The red planet was so beautiful and round, its dry seas and massive mountain peaks, its volcanoes and canals. She watched the polar ice caps. Watched Olympus Mons breaking out of the atmosphere. Imagined a mountain so high, it reached up into space. Imagined women like her climbing it, smaller than ants but with that same ferocious dedication. Somewhere on that world was Terminal.
    â€œPicture yourself standing on the red sands for the very first time,” she tells Haziq, her voice the same singsong of the muezzin at prayer, “that very first step, the mark of your boot in the fine sand. It won’t stay there forever, you know. This is not the moon, the winds will