49
• Silo 18 •
MISSION SAT ON the counter and worked the laces on his boots free. They were soaked, his socks as well. He shucked them off to keep the water out of the bag and to save the weight. Always a porter, thinking about weight. Lyn handed him one of the Security overalls, an extra precaution. He wiggled out of his porter blues and tugged the whites on while Lyn looked the other way. His knife he strapped back to his waist.
‘You guys sure you’re up for this?’ he asked.
Lyn helped him slide his feet into the bag and worked the inside straps around his ankles. ‘Are you sure?’ she asked, cinching the straps.
Mission laughed, his stomach fluttering with nerves. He stretched out and let them work the top straps under his shoulders. ‘Have you both eaten?’
‘We’ll be fine,’ Joel said. ‘Stop worrying.’
‘If it gets late—’
‘Lie your head back,’ Lyn told him. She worked the zipper up from his feet. ‘And don’t talk unless we tell you it’s okay.’
‘We’ll take a break every twenty or so,’ Joel said. ‘We’ll bring you into a bathroom with us. You can stretch and get some water.’
Lyn worked the zipper up over his chest to his chin, hesitated, then kissed the pads of her fingers and touched his forehead the same way he’d seen countless loved ones and priests bless the dead. ‘May your steps rise to the heavens,’ she whispered.
Her wan smile caught in the spill of Joel’s flashlight before the bag was sealed up over Mission’s face.
‘Or at least until Upper Dispatch,’ Joel added.
They carried him outside and down the hall, and the porters made way for the dead. Several hands reached out and touched Mission through the black plastic, showing respect, and he fought not to flinch or cough. It felt as though the smoke was trapped in the bag with him.
Joel took the lead, which meant Mission’s shoulders were pressed against his. He faced upward, his body swaying in time to their steps, the straps beneath his armpits pulling the opposite way from what he was used to. It grew more comfortable as they hit the stairs and began the long spiral up. His feet were lowered until the blood no longer pooled in his head. Lyn carried her half of his weight from several steps below.
The dark and quiet overtook him as they left the chaos of Lower Dispatch. The two porters didn’t talk as some tandems might. They saved their breath and kept their thoughts to themselves. Joel set an aggressive pace. Mission could sense it in the gentle swaying of his body, suspended above the steel treads.
As the steps passed, the journey grew more and more uncomfortable. It wasn’t the difficulty breathing, for he had been shadowed well to manage his lungs on a long climb. He could also handle the stuffiness from the plastic pressed against his face. Nor was it the dark, for his favourite hour for porting had always been the dim-time, time alone with his thoughts while others slept. It wasn’t the stench of plastic and smoke, the tickle in his throat or the pain of the straps.
It was the act of lying still. Of being carried. Of being a burden.
The straps pinched his shoulders until his arms fell numb, and he swayed in the darkness, the sounds of boots on steel, of Joel and Lyn’s heavy breathing, as he was lifted up the stairwell. Too great a burden, he thought.
He thought of his mother carrying him for all those months with no one to confide in and no one to support her. Not until his father had found out, and by then it was too late to terminate the pregnancy. He wondered how long his father had hated the bulge in her belly, how long he had wanted to cut Mission out like some kind of cancer. Mission had never asked to be carried like that. And he had never wanted to be ported by anyone ever again.
Two years ago to the day. That was the last time he had felt this, this sense of being a burden to all. Two years since he had proved too much for even a rope to bear.
It was a poor knot he had tied. But his hands had been trembling and he had fought to see the knot through a film of tears. When it failed, the knot didn’t come free so much as slide, and it left his neck afire and bleeding. His great regret was having jumped from the lower stairwell in Mechanical, the rope looped over the pipes above. If he had gone from a landing, the slipping knot wouldn’t have mattered. The fall would’ve claimed him.
Now he was too scared to try again. He was as scared of trying again as he was of being a burden to another. Was that why he avoided seeing Allie, because she longed to care for him? To help support him? Was that why he ran away from home?
The tears finally came. His arms were pinned, so he couldn’t wipe them away. He thought of his mother, about whom he could only piece together a few details. But he knew this of her: she hadn’t been afraid of life or death. She had embraced both in an act of sacrifice, giving her own blood for his, a trade he would never feel worthy of.
The silo spun slowly around him; the steps sank one at a time; and Mission endured the suffering. He laboured not to sob, seeing himself for the first time in that utter darkness, knowing his soul more fully in that deathly ritual of being ported to his grave, this sad awakening on his birthday.