Catherine House

by Elisabeth Thomas

  “No, I do know. My eggs are better. The only thing you win at is watching.”

  I laughed. “What?”

  “Your eyes.” He gestured toward his own, though he wasn’t looking at me. “You stare. You don’t blink. I bet you’d win, like. Any staring contest. Even in, like. A carnival.”

  “You stare. You’re the one who stares.” I rocked back on my heels. “Look at me.”

  He looked up.

  “Wait,” I said, “let me get my eyes moist.”

  I closed my eyes, then opened them again.

  I could do this. I could win.

  But he was already laughing and shaking his head. He reached for the bottle of wine.

  “God,” I said lightly. “I’m already stressed about my tutorial project. My advisor wants an outline of my prospective reading by next week.” I crossed my legs. “How’s yours going?”

  He shrugged.

  “What are you doing it on?”

  He hesitated. “I have a topic,” he said finally. “A good one. But the department doesn’t want me to do it.”

  “Why not?”

  He shrugged again.

  “What’s the topic?”

  “It’s—come on, it’s not interesting. I promise.”

  I said, “I’m interested.”

  He swirled the wine in his teacup.

  “All right,” he said. “Well, it’s hard to explain if you don’t have a real understanding of plasm, which most people don’t. But think of it this way.” He shifted on his heels. “Most new material experimentation and mending has been done discretely, on one particular object or one particular animal or person. Even when we’re mending across holes or whatever other distances, it’s about uniting disparate parts of a single item. Or what we’re thinking as of a single item. But the truth is, plasm doesn’t really work like that. It’s material, yes, the prima materia—the substance of creation—but more importantly, it’s a network connecting all things, everywhere. Everything real, anyway. And that conception of plasm as a network is what’s really exciting. The network is what makes mending possible in the first place. So I want to experiment with not just mending one object or another, but mending across objects, in a system. Get it?”

  “No,” I said.

  Theo downed his cup of tea.

  I placed my hand over his.

  “Show me,” I whispered.

  He looked into my eyes. He wiped his lips with the back of his hand.

  “In the new materials lab,” I said. “I’ve never been. I want to see. If your stomach feels better.”

  He stood up.

  “It feels—” He tripped over his feet as he reached for shoes. “Never better.”

  The new materials lab was in Harrington, where I had followed the concentrators after session so many weeks ago. Now here I was following Theo past the same chlorine-scented halls and up the same stairway. The walls shifted with moon shadows. He grabbed my hand to steer me along the long yellow hallway. My heart thumped.

  Theo opened the door and flicked on the lights.

  It was a narrow, ugly room in the stark fluorescence. Students from outside the concentration weren’t necessarily forbidden from entering, but the space still had a hush of privacy about it. Long lab tables covered with various messes of flasks and books and random things—embroidery kits, broken pocket mirrors—receded into the depths of the room. Plasm pin kits lay open, forgotten, on stools and across pages of scribbled reports. The blackboard was filled with notes and equations I didn’t understand.

  I paced the room, running my hand along one lab table’s sleek laminate surface. The stainless-steel fixtures flashed.

  So this was where Catherine’s funding went.

  I wrinkled my nose. The room had a warm animal smell. When I turned, I saw that a series of cages lined one of the walls.

  I bent to look in. Most of the cages were empty, but one had a nest of shavings with a little family of white mice. And farther, deep in the shadows of another, sat a white rabbit. Its eyes were closed.

  Theo strode toward the back of one of the lab tables. “So,” he said, “you understand plasm as the prima materia.”

  “Kind of,” I said, unbending from the cage. “Material as the origin of material.”

  “Right. So that when we manipulate plasm in an object—or an animal—we’re manipulating … well, think of it like manipulating the object’s soul. If souls were real. Right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Man, I bet you’ve never even seen—wait. Let me show you.”

  Theo pulled out a cage and set it on the lab table. A mouse was sniffing around inside.

  He glanced at me. “You won’t tell anyone, right?” Then he smiled. “Of course you won’t. You never say anything.”

  He reached into the cage and deftly grabbed the mouse by the tail, as if he had done it many times before. At the same time, he pulled a knife out of a drawer.

  He nicked the mouse’s belly. For a moment, nothing happened. Then blood began beading on the mouse’s fragile skin.

  Theo placed the mouse on the lab table. He grabbed two plasm pins that had been sitting nearby.

  “I know they don’t look it, but these are pretty powerful,” he said as he stroked them along the mouse’s wound, then wrapped them along its body. His voice was low with concentration. “Pretty big procedure for a cute little guy like this. Look.”

  The mouse sat frozen under the touch of the plasm pins. Its nose twitched in wild panic. But the blood had stopped beading. It had stopped flowing at all.

  I shouldn’t have been surprised to see the plasm pins mend a live wound. I imagined the Catherine doctor used the pins in her cabinet for cuts and injuries. And, of course, I knew how powerful the pins were; I had felt them myself. But for some reason, watching the mouse’s cut close up, I felt queasy.

  I blinked. “Right,” I said.

  “So,” Theo said as he placed the mouse back in its cage, “it looks impressive, but it’s really not that different from the psychosexual mending we’ve been doing. It’s easy, surface-level stuff. We’re just manipulating …” I could see his brain working, trying to figure out how to explain it to me. “We’re just manipulating what’s already there,” he finally said. “All the changes are very local. And in terms of plasm, animals and objects are basically the same. That’s what people don’t get.” He glanced at the mouse. “Anyway, this shit looks way more impressive than it actually is. We could do much more now. Like, what if instead of manipulating the plasm within each object, we manipulated it between objects?”

  I followed Theo to the end of the lab table, over to a cardboard box. The box was filled with shavings and another little mouse, sniffing contentedly. There was also a cheap plastic mirror, the kind that hung in barbershops. It leaned against one side of the box, and a teddy bear slumped against the other. A fluffy, curly-haired, black-eyed teddy bear with a red ribbon tied around its neck.

  Plasm pins snaked through the shavings, connecting the mirror to the teddy bear, and the teddy bear to the mouse.

  “This is Gerald,” Theo said, tapping against the cardboard. “Say hi, Gerald.”

  I bent toward the box. The mouse’s eyes darted to me, but the pin stopped him from moving. “Hi, Gerald,” I said.

  “Gerald’s been my buddy for a while now. But look—”

  He reached inside, undid the pins, and grabbed Gerald. His little mouse legs squirmed as Theo turned him over.

  Gerald’s belly was nicked, just like the other mouse’s. He was bleeding.

  “You hurt him,” I said.

  “No,” he said, “he’s not hurt. Not really. I cut him there a month ago. The cut hasn’t healed, but it hasn’t changed, either.”

  I opened my hand. Theo slid Gerald into my palm. The mouse moved sluggishly, as if emerging from a deep dream. I brushed his tiny skull. I could feel his heart beating.

  “Don’t you get it?” he said. “I’ve used the pins to connect him to the
plasm in the mirror and the plasm in the teddy bear. To a network. He’s pinned to them. And you see, I can even remove him from the pins for a while, and the effect stays the same. It’s like … he’s knitted to them.”

  “You’ve joined them. Joined their exterior plastic infinities to their interior plastic infinities.”

  “What?”

  I rubbed Gerald’s nose. “It’s from Boccioni’s manifesto of Futurist sculpture.”

  “If you say so.”

  “You’re not just mending one object,” I said. “You’re mending a circuit. Generating plasm off one thing and into another. Like a series of batteries.”

  Theo nodded. “Right,” he said. “Exactly. Which only works because plasm really does operate as a system, not just as random individual clusters that make up one object, animal, or person. Nothing and no one is really alone. We have to stop thinking that way. We’re all infinitely connected, all part of the same structure. And once we understand that, look what happens.” He touched Gerald’s head. “We get past the framework of deterioration versus recovery, age versus youth … And we find whole new modes of life. Life in suspended animation.”

  I slipped Gerald back in the cage. My hand was dotted with mouse blood.

  “So,” I said. “You guys really are testing on animals. Obviously.”

  Theo shrugged as he pinned Gerald back in the box. “I mean, yeah. And Viktória and M. Neptune test on us, of course. But even the coming in and stuff isn’t anything new. That’s still discrete mending, just … well, what’s known as ‘psychosexual’ mending rather than corporeal. Souped-up Freud shit, basically. But this”—he gestured toward Gerald’s box—“mending across multiple objects, using lifeless objects to sustain living beings—this is the future of plasm. It’s gotta be. And that’s the direction M. Shiner was kind of going in, but …” He shifted on his feet, then said, “I mean, we all know M. Shiner’s methods were shitty and he was a bit, um, hyperbolic about his results. But he wasn’t as insane as people think. It’s just that people were afraid of his big questions. About life and death. So they never took him seriously. But what’s the point of doing anything if you’re not trying to answer the big questions?”

  Gerald sniffed at his teddy bear.

  For some reason I thought of the Weissenbruch painting in the gallery. The little sparrow, “so beautifully alive, forever,” fluttering through its rigid landscape.

  “Anyway,” Theo said, “I’m just playing around. It hasn’t come to anything yet.”

  Gerald settled into his shavings.

  “Do you think you’ll ever go into the umbrella room?” I said.

  “The umbrella room?”

  “The lab in the back of Ashley, in the hallway with the umbrella wallpaper,” I said. “The room with the keypad.”

  “Oh, M. Neptune’s lab.” Theo smiled sadly. “Man, I wish. No. I don’t, uh, I don’t do so good in M. Neptune’s class. He says I’m a sloppy scholar, that my research is all over the place. And apparently, I can’t write. Cogently, I can’t write cogently. I get the worst grades from him. It’s messed up.”

  He scratched his head.

  “To be honest—I’m not doing so great right now,” he said, lower. “None of my professors like what I’m doing. They’re more into, like, philosophy and critical theory, which I’m pretty bad at. I can show what I mean, but I’m not good at explaining how it works. If it were fifteen years ago, maybe it’d be different, but the department’s been pretty strict about who can experiment after everything with M. Shiner. I’m not getting into that lab. I might not even graduate in the concentration.”

  He picked up a pencil and passed it idly from one hand to another.

  “M. Neptune wants to meet with me next week,” he said. “To talk about my time here. My ‘academic path,’ he called it. You know what that means.”

  I looked up, but Theo wouldn’t meet my eye. Would they really throw out someone as smart as him?

  “I want to keep going,” he whispered. “I can’t change my topic. I just can’t. I’m not going to write up some stupid critical research essay about, like, plasm in blood proteins or something. I’m not going to give up my project. This is what I came here to do.”

  Gerald had fallen asleep again.

  “Maybe I can get the key to M. Neptune’s lab,” I said, “and tell you what’s there. If it’s even wilder than this.”

  Theo laughed. “What, without even being in the concentration? What are you going to do, seduce someone into letting you in?”

  “Sure,” I said. “I was going to seduce you, but if M. Neptune hates you, I guess I need another plan.”

  “Well. If you do get in, let me know. I bet they have some great shit in there.”

  “You, too,” I said, “for me. If you get in, tell me. What’s inside.”

  “Sure.”

  “Promise?”

  “Promise,” he said.

  “Pinkie-swear.”

  We pinkie-swore. Then we spat on our hands and shook.

  *

  Spring warmed and swelled. Sweet grass perfumed the yard and petals blanketed the pathways. Down in the garden, the lilacs and honeysuckles bloomed and bees hummed over the fountain. On the balcony, in the afternoon, ants swarmed over our abandoned tea things, the honey and the creamer.

  We ate light breakfasts of cantaloupe and yogurt and lingered in the morning room playing cards. In class, we passed each other notes and made paper airplanes. We lazed on the yard after dinner, drinking warm wine. We played Capture the Flag and Ghost in the Graveyard. I ran until my lungs hurt, then collapsed to the ground. The grass and soil felt so cool beneath my neck, the stars so high and whirling.

  As I hurried between classes, my back damp with sweat, I saw everything with electric specificity. I saw a first-year girl’s T-shirt ride up as she waved to her roommate across a courtyard. I saw the roommate wave back and giggle. I saw sun glint off her necklace. I saw my professor’s hand twitch as it closed the classroom door and turned off the light. As the days heated up, everything smelled closer and hotter. I walked by a boy on a bench, smelled his sour sweat, and thought, After class, he’s going to fuck his girlfriend. When I turned to look back at him, I was jostled by a girl jogging past me, and I smelled her, too. She was late to class.

  Fantasy twilights softened into night. At session, the words flowed so easily I felt as if someone else’s spirit were speaking through my mouth: I am down the hall. The hall is in the house. We ate dinners of salmon, melon salad, and peach shortcakes with cream. We did our homework on the yard. We drank more wine. We felt so good.

  Anna and I stayed up late in the parlor putting together a jigsaw puzzle. The picture was of a kitten playing with a ball of yarn. “What do you think it feels like to be a man?” Anna said as we worked. “To have a penis and, like—just fuck over the whole world?”

  “Incredible,” I said. “So amazing.”

  The night grew longer, and Anna fell asleep on the puzzle. I picked off the pieces stuck to her face. Her skin felt cool and soft.

  *

  “Oh my God,” Nick said as his croquet ball rolled into the bushes. “You are too mean.”

  “You can hit me back,” I said.

  He gave me the finger and darted after his ball.

  “I love you,” I said.

  I hitched up my pajama pants, bent to get a better view, and aimed for my next move. I was going to ruin Nick’s life.

  We had set up the croquet game near the sunflower field. We assigned the mallet colors by personality—I was black, “because you’re such a depressive mean-ass bitch”—and Yaya had brought the hats we’d found in the attic, because what was a garden party without sun hats? Nick’s straw boater kept flying off in the breeze; Anna laughed every time he scampered after it. Diego had mixed up glasses of moonshine mint juleps for us. The ice cubes chimed like bells as we roamed over the grass, the glasses sweating against our palms.

  I pushed down the brim of my hat and
idly swung my mallet. The yard smelled cheery today, like strawberries and clover.

  Theo and Yaya were striding over to us from the Molina courtyard.

  Nick swung at my ball. He missed. He cursed.

  “Ines,” Yaya called to me, “come here. We have a surprise for you.”

  “What kind of surprise?”

  “An important surprise,” Theo said. “A life-changing surprise.”

  “I don’t have time for life-changing surprises.” I strolled over to my ball. “I’m about to murder Nick.”

  Nick slurped at his mint julep.

  Theo leaned against a tree and tapped his arm. He was smiling at me.

  “Be patient,” I said. I lined up my shot.

  After I won the game, I followed Theo and Yaya out of the garden, past the fountain in the bluebell field, and into the yard. There, leaning against an oak tree, stood the bicycle.

  I walked over and pulled it upright. It looked different here in the daylight, out from the attic’s gloom. The metal gleamed silvery rocket-blue, like some futuristic wonder machine.

  “Theo helped me bring it down,” Yaya said. “We decided it’s time for you to learn how to ride.”

  I ran a hand along its leather seat.

  First Yaya showed me how to brake. “I know it’s not your style, but it really is a most important skill,” she said with teacherly priss. I leaned against her arm as she placed my feet on the pedals. It was easy enough. But when I pushed off, my stomach dropped with the panic of falling, and I grabbed at Theo.

  “Wait,” he said against my neck, “you need momentum—”

  I toppled against him. My pajamas pants were covered with grass stains.

  They piled me back onto the bike and pushed me forward. After some shaky starts, I was really up, and my feet cycled faster. Theo was shouting, “Go! Go! Go!”

  I was going. I was bicycling across the yard, toward the trees. I was flying. I screamed.

  Then my legs scrambled, the sky tilted, and I was down again.

  “Are you okay?” Theo yelled as they ran after me.

  I couldn’t answer, though. I was out of breath, and laughing.

  Theo collapsed beside me. He was panting, too. His eyes were shining.

  I turned to him. I touched his hand.