Femme fetal

I had a sister, once. We met onboard a nuclear submarine two months into its mission, colliding in the halls as klaxons blared and crewmen stumbled over each other to staunch the flow of water into the bulkhead, pushing against a gushing tide lit red and fateful by alarm lights. I watched her tumble under with the rest of them, crushed into nothing or pulled out into the deep. I didn’t know her then. I barely know her now.

I only learned her name today, sitting at a railing in one of the best-lit segments of the steam tunnels. A mural swam in and out of focus off to the side. Her back, invisible beneath a white tee and overall straps, dented as it pushed into the bars. I knew her name without asking, but this was the first time I knew; Pila rose out of the fog of my memory, Priscilla Zhang hot on its heels. Like Zuckerberg’s wife? I asked. Zuckerberg was a nobody when I named me, she said.

What was it like before me? I asked. She shook her head, adjusted her plimsolls on the shiny linoleum floor. I don’t remember. Do you remember not being able to speak, or see? To only hear the slosh of the womb? That was what it was like before you.

Oh, I said. If you weren’t you, could I have been you? Never, she said, we would have both been nobody if it weren’t for me.

Oh, I said.

We sat in silence a little bit. There was nowhere to go because the steam tunnels had no unlocked doors, because we were there without having gone in. Between us was a gap of weeks, years. I don’t know how far away she was because she didn’t tell me and I forgot to ask.

She looked like me, maybe a little more beautiful; I had no practice seeing her face in the mirror. She kept her hair somewhere between short and long, between up and down. It was black. I didn’t need to ask to know that she hadn’t dyed it. She was older and her face narrower and she never looked me in the eye.

The alarm went off again, water rushing in red and inexorable. This time, I managed to beg, Don’t go.

Okay, she said, and we walked into a movie.

This is my favorite film, I said, conspiratorially. I’ve seen it in theatres three times already. This’ll be my fourth. City lights flashed through the tour bus window, each reflection fifteen stories tall. Pila was turned away from me, a loose lock of hair darting in and out of illumination. What’s it about? she asked.

My answer floundered on its way out. There was darkness and tumult, pinpricks of light that I knew to be information, and physical violence of no consequence, but I couldn’t remember anything else.

I don’t know, I said. Maybe that’s why I have to keep rewatching it.

The bus crashed or the highway dropped off or we cut to another scene; I jerked sideways in every direction at once. Pila pulled me from the wreckage, shrouded in shadow. No water this time, just a lingering disorientation. Still, some part of my body was wet, with blood or piss maybe, and I felt it acutely. We had landed in the living room my parents made after I left for college. There was the familiar dusty chandelier, the unfamiliar dining set and china cabinet. It wasn’t always like this, I told her. I didn’t think we would be the type to not use a good teapot. People change, she said. Duh, I said.

Under the ugly puce lights, Pila seemed very tall. I was wearing a backpack too big for my shoulders and a hideous pink polo dress that had been given to me before puberty. We spent a long time walking to school, her hand gripping mine, as if restraining me from running into traffic. I think you would have liked school, I said. Of course I would have, she said. Were you given a choice?

We seemed to walk the same path over and over but the sidewalk cracks never repeated. I began to drowse; as soon as my head dipped we arrived. The portcullis was in full bloom and the double doors propped open. Inside, fluorescent lights stretched on forever. She held my little hand; we crossed the threshold.

The scale changed. We were back on the nuclear submarine, back in the hallway in the moment before the crash. She was leaning against the wall in the way that I imagined myself leaning against walls. Where are you going? I asked. What’s outside?

You tell me, she said, carried out by the gush of blood.