Goodbye, Orange

When we arrive that evening at the grubby door of the New Prague Intake Facility, Sira is nervous, her hands wringing the pamphlet into a twisted mess. As we wait in the outer vestibule to be scanned and registered, she glances at the door.

"Do you think the drones saw?" she asks, whispering, as a blue beam of light skims over our bodies.

"No," I say.  I have no idea, but there is no point in worrying her. A soft chime sounds and the inner door slides open to admit us.

In the ante-room of the facility, an Intake man sits at a table, gesturing for us to seat ourselves across from him.  Sira, still anxious, makes soft idle chat with him, but his brief replies silence her.  He gives us the whetstone. This time, it's an orange. Scent, he says. I scratch the peel and hold it out to Sira; we inhale the sweet, sharp scent of citrus rind before digging into the thick skin and eating the wedges, our fingers sticky with the flesh. The man looks bored, neutrally polite, looking away as we lick each bead of juice off our fingers. My thumb is stained yellow from peeling back the skin, a discoloration right at the outer part of the nail.

The smell lingers, a pale, flat imitation on my fingers. I raise it up to my nose anyway as he leads us up the hallway to the collection room, inhaling the faint scent. I hold out my hand for Sira to do the same.

“Last chance,” I say. She shakes her head, pushing it away.

“I just want the smell to last–the real one,” she says.

I shrug. I can see the tears in her eyes, but I don’t comment or try to convince her. I had thought the same the first time too. 

For me it was the taste of coffee. It's always the same: they give you the whetstone, sharpen the sense before harvesting. I had sipped the coffee slowly, tasting the rich darkness of the flavour.  Then, I rinsed my mouth out, not wanting the coffee to linger, stale, on my breath. To keep the memory of the fresh taste intact up until the moment of loss.

But now I press my thumb close to my nose, inhaling the citrus scent. It doesn't matter that it's faded a bit: any last moment is better than nothing.  Sira just doesn't know that yet. I’ve lost count of what I’ve lost. Some losses are worse than others: the colour blue, the sound of chickadees in winter, the feel of fingernails on skin. Now, there's just a numb hollow where they used to be.

It was only me coming to Intake before. I didn't want Sira to have to come. But Jovan, her son, is sick now. We’d been able to trade rice at first for the treatment. For three months, we had enough to trade, to put the IV in Jovan’s small arm in the back room of the clinic. But now our apartment’s small rice granary is empty and Jovan is so, so thin. Sira has to come to Intake now too.

This morning, we three lay in bed together, my hand stroking Sira's hair, Jovan nestled between us. He was curled into the hollow of Sira’s body and I watched his ribcage rise and fall on his small frame. I remember how round his cheeks were once. The payment from Intake will fix it. It has to.

We left Jovan with Sira’s nana for the evening.  Before we left, Sira explained to him what we were doing. 

“Goodbye, orange!” she said, her voice singsong-false. “Wave goodbye! Hello, rice!” Jovan had giggled, his small hand waving.

We sit now in the ante-room where the man who gave us the orange left us and a woman walks in. Unlike the man, she is all smiles and clothed in bubble-gum pink medical robes. I wonder how many people she greets can still see that colour. 

She sits, smoothing out the robe. Her nails are perfectly manicured, matching her robe as they glide over the fabric, although I can’t hear the sound. I almost remember it–like a whisper? Like a rustle? How do you describe something you can no longer sense?

She’s asked a question that I’ve missed, so Sira responds. “Not far,” she says, and I can feel her trying not to glance at me.

“Did you have any trouble?”

Sira does look at me this time. “No,” she lies.

Apparently, the man had worn a deep-blue suit, which is why I missed him at first, the colour like a half-remembered voice in another room. Sira told me after that the man had seemed to melt out of the shadows of the alley onto the cobblestones, a form blocking the reflections of the streetlights on the rain-washed street. 

“We don’t have anything on us,” Sira had said softly. That was when I noticed him; I was getting too slow, too dull. Too many trips to Intake. Sira–gentle, quiet Sira–had seen him first. 

Her words didn't stop him, of course. He was probably hoping to steal from us, but if we didn’t have anything worth hawking, we still had flesh. And no one cares about the type of woman out walking late at night in the Intake district. I pulled out my nightstick, extending it in a smooth motion. Sira made no noise, grabbing my sleeve, pulling us together.

I shook her off and swung before he could move closer, the club cracking into his nose, a spray of blood on my jacket. I heard the pat the blood made as it hit the fabric. 

The man lay groaning in the street and Sira stared at me with wide eyes. We were three blocks away before Sira said anything.

“What did he want with us? We didn’t have anything to steal.”

I didn't answer. It was always the same thing, every time going to Intake. 

"Did you have to–"

"Yes," I say. 

The woman in pink drums her nails on her clipboard.

“We’ve had some trouble with people waiting outside the facility,” she says, leaning close as if letting us in on a secret. “Watch out on your way back–sometimes they wait for people once they’ve been paid.” Sira gives her a tight nod and I put my hand on hers.

"Yes," I say.  "We'll be careful." 

Sira says nothing.

The woman leads us into a room and tests our calibration: the sense of the orange scent is strong, ready to harvest. The room is bland, beige: easy enough to stomach after intake. She straps Sira in. I hold her hand through it and then it's my turn. A quick procedure: just a small metal tube pressed against the corresponding region of the skull. A little pressure, then release. They file the tube away with the others. It will travel across foreign borders, into VR streams and sense enhancement capsules for the ultra-rich.

The woman hands us four small bags of rice. I bring my thumb, stained with orange peel, to my nose, but the smell is gone. 

“Hide the bags under your clothing,” the woman advises.

We don't see anyone on our way home, the rice carefully concealed under our clothes. We don't talk about the man we saw or what I did to him. Whether the drones saw.

“We haven’t had an orange at home in ages anyway. I don’t think I’ll miss it,” Sira says as we slowly turn the last corner on the walk home. I say nothing. She'll miss it, but she’ll get used to it. Everyone gets used to it. 

Jovan is waiting up for us–he couldn't sleep, Sira's nana says. His eyes are dark marbles in the hollows of his cheeks, and he runs to us, grinning. 

“Goodbye, orange?” he asks. Sira nods. 

“Goodbye, orange. Hello, rice!”  Her voice is singsong-false as she scoops him up, burying her face in his hair, his body light as a breath.