The Torch
by Samantha Walton
When the Torch passes over me, I lift the frozen fruit from the ice box and set it out to thaw. Nothing tastes quite like it used to, but even darkness can’t kill the flavour of strawberries. They used to say that we eat with our eyes, but they don’t say that anymore.
In the bed next door, Cal is sleeping, and I creep around slowly so as not to wake him. He has been working all day and came home with the groceries and a headache. I asked him to tell me about his work but he passed the shopping bag over and kissed me, silently. Then he walked away from me and into the darkness of our apartment’s back room.
I run a knife through an onion, using my knuckles against the blade to guide me. Once it has been sliced into rough half moons, I tip it into the big pot and listen to it sizzle on the hob. The knife is the same dull grey as the room, and I have to make its shape out by the slight glint of red along its sharpest edge. The whole room is a web of outlines, sketchy suggestions of physical forms. During the Torch’s absence, I use touch, memory, and these little stylised lines to navigate. The tomatoes, the protein flakes, the corn. I stir it all into a mash that Cal will be able to eat in three deep, careless gulps, and then I season it with salt.
In the passway outside, children are playing with a ball which flares and strobes each time they throw it in the air. It seems to fly impossibly high, a firework of flashing greens and reds. It comes as high as my window, filling the whole front room with its glimmer of tiny coloured lights. I wonder if it can see as well as the Torch, and then I stop myself. I force myself to smile when the sparkling sequins light up my skin, glittering like the creatures that once lived in the dark oceans.
The Torch passes over again and I stand still and face into the light. Every little Revolution is a blessing, Mother used to tell me. Like being touched by a god better than men have ever imagined. Who needs a god in the heavens when you can have one passing his great white hand over you ten times an hour, night and day? She would shudder as she said it, and I wondered if she liked the touch of the Torch on her skin, as some people do.
When Cal came for me, I was keen to get the ceremonies over as quickly as possible. Mother wanted things to be done properly, but she wanted me gone too. She kissed me on each cheek when I left and said, you can make your own future now. Our names were on the register and we were placed in a couple’s apartment on the 19th Circle. It was a long walk away from home, in a circle I had never visited before, but when I got there I found the crescent-shaped apartment block the same as all the others. The front room with its huge bare window and its kitchen, the back room with its bed and clothes rail, and the doorless archway between the two, as open as a mouth. Every six minutes, the same brilliant wave of Torchlight passing over us. It was like I hadn’t left at all.
Now that I am gone, I wonder if Mother has moved her bed into the front room to feel the light white on her skin, night and day. It’s supposed to be a sign of devotion, but it’s not compulsory yet.
I will eat three strawberries and then I will get ready to go to the gathering. I will take my soft clothleather bag and my book, which we will take turns to read out loud as the Torch passes over. It’s wonderful how the writers have adapted to the new conditions, writing the short segments we can enjoy in the little bursts we have. Sometimes, a woman will joke that she has become used to reading in the halflight during its absence. We laugh as if we aren’t worried she might be telling the truth.
I close the door of the apartment very slowly so as not to wake Cal. There’s no lock, there is no need for one. The door settles softly in its frame.
On the way down to the street, I share the lift with two women from the floor above. They are chatting about their own gathering. These women are singers and are gossiping about the administrator who reads the lines out for them, how her voice is cracking and how they must find their own notes so as not to be led astray by hers. I wonder why they don’t learn the lines by heart so they don’t need to repeat each line after her. But then singing is the art of group mimicry, and if they sang their parts from their own memories, the humility of the ceremony would be lost.
We separate at the street door with some kind, trite words and they head down the circle torchwise, while I walk inwards along the passway. It is impossible to feel homesick in a city laid out like a labyrinth. Not a maze—the purpose is to never be lost. It’s more like a web, with concentric circles of housing strung together by radiating passways, all of them leading to the Torch.
The Torch is bright white but the streets are the same deep dull red as the back room of the apartments, an effect I once found vaguely erotic. I cringe at the memory now, how as a child pretending to be asleep I would watch the red halo of my parents’ bodies as they performed. It wasn’t compulsory to do it each night, but Mother insisted, the little fanatic. When Cal and I make love, I have to try very hard to associate myself with the sensations, to convince myself that it is my own body experiencing his touch and his movements, and my own self moving against him in return.
The passway is quiet tonight. All I can hear are the steps of women heading to their various meetings. You can’t exactly see their shadows, but you know they’re there by the bulk of them, the dark shape of their dresses, the bundles of their baskets cutting black holes in the crimson gloom. When the Torch comes around, it’s like the flash of a camera freezing us all into unlikely positions, like criminals. We take our bearings and then carry on along our paths, the colours and shapes of the city imprinted on our retinas for a few, intoxicating moments.
I dart down the 12th Circle and follow the curve of the street, looking for the sign of the 56th Passway. The apartment blocks loom up, grey-red and angular, with black cut-out windows partially illuminated by the red bulbs strung along the lines between each street post. When the Torch passes I can see the mothers standing in their front rooms, wiping their countertops or stirring their pots. If the angle is just right, I can see right through to the men in the windowless back rooms. They are pulling off their shirts or standing naked, washing in the chlorinated water of the corner showers. Sometimes a man is sitting on his bed, watching his wife’s back as she prepares his meal. This is what the Torch is meant for, but still, it feels wrong and exciting at the same time. It feels exciting because it feels wrong. It feels wrong because it is exciting.
I enjoy the twenty minute walk I am trusted to take all by myself.
I don’t know why I was assigned the book gathering. I don’t much like this kind of reading, and I find the material uninspiring. Waiting for the next turn is so dull I must close my eyes and imagine myself in a different place, in a different body. I think of colours and changing patterns of light on surfaces whose textures morph and shift like flows of strange water. These are things I’ve never seen, but I’ve been told about them and dream about them, sometimes.
Some women in my group find the silent gaps in the reading meditative. Others work themselves into a frenzy, repeating the last lines aloud, over and over. The words hang about in the darkness, humming, gathering power. I want to prick the words with my sharp little nail and hear them pop, then see them flail and fall to the floor. Instead, I sit silently, picking at my cuticles and trying to close my ears to the gathering sound. I wonder if the writers write by Torch light too, or if they have another arrangement.
Chiara is here tonight, and Aileen too. Chiara has been trying to have a child so has missed the last two gatherings. Sometimes it’s easier to get to the men when they are just home from work, before they collapse into the half light of the back room. That’s a safe reason for missing the gathering, though really the childless wives are meant to leave them on their own for a while to wash and to rest. The nights are so long, there is time for the performance after our first sleep. They are more dreamy and loving then, when they’ve recovered from the heat and the light of work, which hangs around their bodies even in the cool shadows of our beds.
Chiara looks satisfied, and I wonder if she pounced on him just as he came in. Did she pull him into her on the countertop, then rush out so she could make it to the gathering on time? I ask her how she fares and she smiles and says, Right as light. I imagine them in the white light of the front room, bare and triumphant and thrilling in the public gaze of their devotion.
Aileen touches my arm then and I feel better at once. Something about her touch is grounding, tender. When she asks me how I am, I say, Hiding under a bushel, and she laughs through her nose.
We drink the bitter tea and talk for a while about our homes, our husbands. The Torch revolves once, enough to light up our faces so we can tell who is in health, who is suffering, without needing to speak to one another about these difficult things.
After the halflight settles we take our seats in the circle and the administrator reaches for her book. We reach for ours too and open them at the point we left marked at the last meeting. I fondle the pages with my fingers and unfurl the corner I folded down last time. The book is supposed to be treated with respect, but I have no marker to keep my place. I think it is a mark of respect to treat the book like this, like it is my tool, but that is not the way. It suggests that I think the book is mine, when really it is everyone’s.
The next time the Torch lights up the room, the administrator reads the first phrase, and we follow along. Our fingers trace a line under the words and our lips breathe, without sounding, them out. I know how the reading will go already, we all do.
The first error was to hide in darkness.
The second to think that dark hid more than light.
The third to reject illumination.
The fourth to demand it.
And so on, and so on.
Between each sentence is the long absence with the feverish, whispered repetitions. I used to try to meditate on the words during the absence, I really did. I even repeated once, when I was younger, but at some point I gave up.
We have been taught to push thoughts out during the absences, to keep our minds sharpened like a flint.
During the absence, you must bring the light yourself.
But I prefer to wallow in my own darkness.
Aileen is sitting next to me very close, and when the Torch is absent she crosses her arms and slips her hand over to squeeze my elbow. She pulses her fingers and releases, pulses and releases, then begins to run her finger back and forth against the thin, rough skin and bone. I can’t register her touch with a smile, not with the administrator sitting across from me, but I like the feel of her fingers. I feel like I am in my own body, that she is touching me by choice.
The second error was to think that dark hid more than light.
As the reading goes on, the book tells us about the coming of the Torch. The darkness spread and the people were left in the shadows, clutching at the ravaged crops and trying to find water. It’s the same boring old story, but behind it there is another story, the one Father told me. I remember his oil-soaked hands, his talk of mechanics and the full, clear light he worked by in the factories. He would look up at the sky, amber-tinged, and tell me how you could once see stars. It was Mother who handed him in, in the end.
Sometimes the Torch becomes a searchlight, and sometimes it becomes a floodlight.
The night after Father left, Mother was deathly quiet. I expected her to wail, to tell me she’d been betrayed, anything to show that something had happened. But she lay there silent as a stone. I stayed awake watching her, observing the way the red glow lit up her profile, turning her into a child’s drawing of herself. Father had told me about the dull bulbs they use to light the passways, how it is the same safelight used to light darkrooms, where photographs were once made. I wondered if I stared at Mother long enough I would burn that image of her face into my mind forever. Father told me that even safelights weren’t safe indefinitely.
I’ve never seen a photograph. What would we do with them, when everything looks the same? Still, I’d like a way to remember Father, and Aileen too, perhaps. The way she slips her hand away just as the Torch passes is so skilful and thrilling, I’d like to have a picture of the calm, just face she pulls when the light is on her.
The third error was to reject illumination.
My line comes next and I savour it, letting the words grow in my mouth and glow and linger in the air. I love the repetitions when they follow the cadence of my own beautiful sentence. I wonder if this is the deep, tender feeling of purpose that the women are chasing when they become administrators, but that’s enough to snip the little pleasure off at the bud for me completely.
The reading will go on for another hour, each woman taking her turn. The turn means we must focus, and those who repeat are proving their constant devotion. I wonder how it will work when the girls who aren’t being taught to read are old enough to join us.
Now that my turn is over, I can let my mind wander. I have learnt to keep my face very still—we all have—to take these trips into and beyond ourselves. I don’t even need to close my eyes. My finger traces the lines on the page. I mouth the words, a cut-out picture of devotion.
I will walk right down the 56th Passway, arm in arm with Aileen, all the way to the perimeter circle. When I look deep into the true black of the outer sphere, I won’t feel any fear. Father told me there are people living out there. I want to believe him, though I can’t quite let myself yet. My pupils will dilate as they try to take in the impossible, obliterating expanse of the darkness. I would like to be the kind of woman who could run into it, and look back to see the Torch as just a pinprick of light abandoned in the desert.
Aileen’s fingers are tracing lines on my flesh again, and I take the risk of closing my eyes to focus on her touch. I think that I would like a photograph of the marks she is making on me, documented in the darkness of my eyelids and on the underside of my skin. She is writing a book on my body and I am her only reader.
We will have to make do with touch, memory, and the little stylised lines she is making to find our way out of here.
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Contains work from Zoë Wicomb, Dorothy Cornish, Imtiaz Dharker, and Heather Parry, along with a conversation with Kathleen Jamie and Nina Mingya Powles