When he saw the sun, he cried then laughed. I cry-laughed with him. Female students we passed stared at him in open awe. He smiled at one, who turned a deep crimson shade.
After an hour, we returned to the workshop room and he slept. I was thankful we hadn’t run into Jameson; I wanted his first meeting with Gabriel to be perfectly engineered. Of course he was curious; he took every opportunity to remind me that my deadline was only two weeks away. I told him I wouldn’t miss it.
First, though, I wanted a test run with someone else, so I invited Mackenzie to meet him.
I tried to give Gabriel a crash course in morality first. He didn’t immediately understand when I told him that he couldn’t touch Mackenzie the way he touched me, but he agreed.
Mackenzie arrived at Gabriel’s room at the appointed time. I opened the door, she saw him, and her expression froze.
“Hello, Mackenzie,” he said, just as we’d practiced, “it’s very nice to meet you.”
She inclined her head toward me and half-whispered, “Holy shit, Ari, he’s gorgeous.”
The meeting went flawlessly. Gabriel offered her a bottle of water. She took it, and we all chatted mindlessly for fifteen minutes.
The only surprise was the way Gabriel held onto me. He squeezed my hand so hard it hurt. I was recording the meeting and didn’t want to give away my discomfort, but it was hard to maintain my composure.
Mackenzie finally gave me a hug, told me how proud of me she was, and left. I did turn off the cameras, then, and asked Gabriel why he’d held my hand so tightly.
“I don’t know,” he said.
Finally, the time came to meet with Jameson. This, the last and greatest test, I wanted to take place in Jameson’s office; I wanted him to see Gabriel walk in with me. We rehearsed the meeting for two days in advance. I felt certain we were ready.
In the afternoon of the thirtieth day of Gabriel’s existence, we both entered Jameson Charters’ office. I had a bound book of my notes and a thumb drive of all the videos that I deposited on Jameson’s battered old metal desk before saying, “Dr. Charters, please meet Gabriel.”
Gabriel thrust out a hand. Jameson, his eyes never leaving Gabriel’s, rose slowly to accept the greeting. They shook silently, and then Jameson’s eyes moved slowly over Gabriel’s form, which I’d clad in a simple suit, no tie.
“Well, it’s not a puddle of sentient slime, I’ll grant you that,” Jameson said, never glancing at me, “but can it do anything?”
“What would you like me to do, Dr. Charters?” Gabriel asked, smiling.
Jameson looked at me then and nodded.
~
I was released from my apprenticeship a week later, a full-fledged journeyman member of the Gifted.
Gabriel and I even became minor celebrities within Gifted circles. Of course Jameson tried to take much of the credit, but the real story (isn’t it always?) was the one about the relationship between my creation and me.
As much as it hurt, Mackenzie and I gave up our apartment together; she’d taken a job in Seattle, and I had Gabriel now. With Mackenzie gone, he moved into the old apartment. We both began to receive job offers, me in the Gifted-friendly biotech firms I’d hoped for while Gabriel fielded offers to act.
We went to functions almost nightly—parties, networking opportunities, podcast recordings. Gabriel reeled from it at first, but he adapted quickly. He began to develop his own personality, his own likes and dislikes, his own friends and favorites.
One night at a party, I couldn’t help but notice his arm wrapped around my waist. At first it felt warm, affectionate, protective, but at some point I realized it wasn’t that. He was steering me where he wanted to go. When I disengaged he looked down, frowning. “What is it?”
“I’m just going to get something to drink.”
“Oh. I’ll come with you.”
Day after day, night after night, he stayed next to me. When I sat at home one afternoon weighing three positions with different companies, he pointed at a folder. “That’s the one,” he said.
I laughed and looked up at him. “Really? I was about to move them to the pass pile.”
“But I like them.”
He didn’t offer an explanation, and I didn’t ask.
Two nights later, we had dinner with the firm’s CEO and his wife, the latter obviously quite taken with Gabriel. The CEO, a man named Arthur Abrams, had chosen the restaurant, so I asked him what was good on the menu. He told me. When the waiter arrived, Gabriel ordered for me. He didn’t order what Arthur had suggested. He was cool throughout most of the rest of the meal. By the end of the evening, I knew I wouldn’t be working for Arthur’s company.
Later, at home, I asked Gabriel what he’d been thinking. “I didn’t like him,” he said. “I think he just wants to have sex with you.”
This was not the man I thought I’d created.
“You know I just lost that job,” I said.
“That wasn’t the right job for you.”
I didn’t sleep well that night. When Gabriel reached for me in bed, I got up, dressed, and left the apartment. I drove through the night, ignoring my phone. I watched the sun rise over Santa Monica Bay, wishing I still shared the apartment with Mackenzie.
I knew what I had to do.
I contacted Kristina Ling, who remembered me as Mackenzie’s friend, and asked if I could rent her studio for a week. She said it was available in the evenings, and I could use it for free. She asked if she could meet Gabriel, who she’d heard so much about; lying, I told her she could.
I returned to the apartment, gathered books and equipment, told Gabriel something urgent had come up and I had to help a friend. He followed me with a continuous string of questions. “What’s this project? How long will you be gone? Does it involve Arthur?”
I didn’t tell him he was the project.
~
I spent the rest of that day going over my notes. Where had I failed? Had it been the hero, infesting the heart? The Mycenaean priest, his ashes poisoning the skin? Surely not the great, wise old oak.
What if it was the part of me, the rib?
Or … what if it was something so basic to Gabriel’s sex that not even magic could deny it?
I called Mackenzie. I cried as I told her about yesterday. “Oh, Ari,” she said, speaking from her new apartment in Seattle, “I’m so sorry. What are you going to do?”
“I’m not going to take it.”
“Good! I’m glad to hear that. But you can’t just leave him …”
I told her then what I was going to do.
~
That was five days ago.
Gabriel lies unmoving on a wooden table in Kristina’s studio. That’s where he’s been since I invited him over and gave him an enchantment-infused tea.
Here’s what I told Mackenzie: “I’m going to change him.”
She’d taken a beat before reminding me that I’d once thought I might be able to change Devonté. This was different, I reminded her. I’d made Gabriel, after all.
I’ve been here for five days, chanting over him, performing purification rituals, invoking cleansing spirits, replacing and renewing.
I’m afraid to awaken him. I’m afraid the first thing he’ll do will be to storm out of the studio, tell me I can never do this again.
But if that happens, I will do it again. I’ll do it until I get it right. We may all be born broken, but some of us can be unborn and unbroken.
And our imperfect clay will be changed.
Spectral Evidence
Victor LaValle
“They think I’m a fraud.”
“They think I’m a fraud.”
I like to repeat this to myself in the mirror before I go out and do my job. It might seem weird to say something cruel right before I perform, but I thrive on the self-doubt. If I go out
there feeling too confident then I don’t work as hard. It’s easy to get lazy in this trade but I take the job seriously. For instance, the word “psychic” does not appear anywhere in the window of my storefront. I never say it to my visitors. I call what I do “communication.”
The other value in staying behind the curtain for a minute is that it gives the guests a chance to sniff around the parlor. They want to peruse the décor. They yearn to leaf through the handful of books I keep on the low shelf by the chairs. They’re here for a performance, too. If I stepped out too soon they wouldn’t have the chance to reconnoiter and then while I’m talking they’re casting their eyes around the room and I have to repeat myself. Or, even worse, we just never make a connection. I’m not here for the ten dollars I charge during the initial visit. That money doesn’t even cover the cost of all the coffee I drink in a day. Of course I’m in this for the money, everyone’s got to make a living, but even that isn’t the real goal. As I said, I am a communicator and when a session works right all of us in the room play a part in the transmission. And at the end I get paid so what’s wrong with that?
I like to start work in the morning. Not many others do. Most folks who do this kind of work don’t even open their eyes until mid-afternoon. Their days start in the early evening and run through the dawn. But that’s not my way. For one, there’s too much competition and I’m not part of a family or a crew. For instance, the Chinese work in small groups and cater only to their own. I tried to learn Cantonese for about fifteen minutes but one them took a liking to me and explained that no Chinese person would ever go to an American woman for help so what was the point? I didn’t take offense to it. She communicated something important to me. The only thing I can still say in Cantonese is, Can I have your address? At least I think that’s what it means.
The other reason I like mornings is because it means I mostly get old people coming through the door. You know why they’re here? Most of them just want to talk and it turns out I do too. The cards I turn over at my table are secondary. Their loneliness is what blew them into my store. Isolation is as powerful as a gale force wind. There’s times when we’ve been going at it for an hour or three and before they leave they actually force a little more money on me, like I’m a niece who should buy herself a new dress or something.
Which is why, I admit, I’m baffled by the three folks who are in the parlor right now. Can’t be more than nineteen or twenty. Girls. They might be drunk. People who are drunk at eleven in the morning are scary, no matter what. They’re so far gone they can’t even talk quietly. Even when they shush themselves they only come down to about a nine on the dial. Immediately I figure they were passing by and decided to stumble in for a laugh. The best I can hope for is to get them in and out quick, collect a few dollars, then greet my usual morning crowd. I’m already looking forward to hearing about someone’s endless concerns for a grandchild compared to corralling three drunks for half an hour. But work is work. They came in and I called out that I’d be there in a minute. Then I gave them five minutes to poke around. I tend to wait until they get to the books. The shelf is low and right by the chairs so if they’re reading the titles it means they’re probably sitting down.
“Wonders of the Invisible World,” one reads aloud. She moves on to the next. “The Roots of Coincidence.”
“Just sit down, Abby.”
“Where is this lady?”
“It’s too dark in here.”
They’re getting impatient. I give myself one more look in the mirror. I’ve been trying out this new look, a scarf wrapped round my head, one that drapes down around my neck as well. It makes me look like I’m from the silent movie era, think of Theda Bara in Cleopatra. But last week when I came out wearing it the guy in the chair asked me if I was a Muslim and things stayed tense after that. But these are three women and I tell myself they’ll appreciate the flourish. More than that, I like the look.
I give the scarf one last touch and whisper the five words to myself. “They think I’m a fraud.”
Then it’s time for the show.
~
Two of them want to leave after ten minutes, but it’s the third who won’t get out of her chair. Abby is her name. Her head is down for most of my reading, hair hanging over her eyes. Her friends find her exhausting, but I try not to be hard on them. After all they haven’t left her side. Abby is the only one who doesn’t ask silly questions. I know how that might sound to some. Any serious question at a storefront psychic’s must be, by definition, “silly.” I get it. There’s hardly room for all three of them on the other side of my table, it’s a little wooden countertop that’s really only made for two. But it doesn’t matter, only one of them wants to be sitting across from me.
Abby’s mother died six years ago, that’s what brought Abby here. As soon as she says this I find a part of my heart warming to her. Suddenly she doesn’t look all that different than my Sonia. What would she have been like if I’d died when she was twelve or thirteen? Would she have ended up in a place like this, with someone like me, or much worse than me? I find myself feeling even more grateful for her friends, no matter how impatient they’re becoming. They will not abandon her, at least not today. I wish I could remember either of their names.
“I just want to know if …” Abby whispers. Even though she seems tortured I don’t think she’s going to cry. She sounds resigned. “Is there something … after all this?”
I have a few things I usually say when people skirt close to this subject, the whole point of being here. But I can’t think of them because I’ve never had someone ask the question so directly before.
“Okay,” one of the friends says, rising to her feet. She’s the smallest of the three, but the most potent. This one is the sergeant-at-arms when they go out to the bar. She looks at me. “We’re going to miss our train back if we don’t leave now.”
The other friend is in worse shape, she sort of oozes off her chair. For a moment it’s not clear if she’ll fall flat or stand up. She stands, puts a hand on Abby’s shoulder but it doesn’t look like comfort, only a way to keep her balance. It looks, for a moment, like she’s crushing the poor kid.
Abby nods and finally rises as well. Is it strange that I’m thinking less of Abby and more of her mother? Trying to guess what I’d want some stranger to have said to Sonia if she’d come to them pleading for answers, or at least comfort. I guess the obvious choice is to say something simple and uplifting, but I can’t do that about something so serious. Anyway, I can tell that’s not what she really wants to hear.
While I’m struggling Abby opens her bag and finds three ten-dollar bills. She hands them across the table to me and of course I do take them. We’ve been together for a half-hour, exactly like I’d expected. I hold Abby’s wrist. What should I say? What should I say? All my talk about putting on a show and I’ve got no preplanned act that will work for this.
“Yes,” I say and squeeze her hand. It’s the best I can do. The friends are already at the door, opening it and letting in cold air and sunlight. “There is more.”
Abby looks at me directly; chin up. It’s the first time I get to see her eyes. They’re red from lack of sleep. She cocks her head to the left, seems surprised to hear me being so definitive. Then she pulls her hand free and follows her friends out of my life.
~
My daughter died a year ago this July. Sonia went to the Turning Stone Casino in Verona and jumped from the 21st floor. We hadn’t spoken to each other in almost four years by that point. I hadn’t even known she was living upstate. The coroner’s office sent me an envelope with her last effects. Inside I found loose change and receipts from the ATM in the casino lobby, a flip phone that had somehow survived the fall, and a broken watch. It had been the watch that tore me open. I’d given it to her when she graduated high school. I didn’t know she’d kept it all that time. It’s not like it had stopped at the moment of impact or
anything, the hands weren’t even still attached. In a way that seemed more accurate. For her and for me time didn’t stop, it shattered.
~
It’s nearly eight by the time I get home. I’ve been in this apartment for three decades, raised Sonia here. After Abby and her friends left I welcomed my stream of regulars, but I thought about Abby the whole time. Most of my days are as long as this one. I leave early for work and don’t come home until dinner. All I do is sleep in this place now. I avoid it. I should admit that to myself.
I come through the front door with my late night pick up of Thai food and in the kitchen I make a plate. For a little while—all of last year—I would eat the food right out of the container. There were times when I didn’t even take the container out of the bag. It got to be too sad. So now I pull down a plate and utensils. I find the white wine in the fridge and pour myself a glass. I even sit in the same spot I’ve been using since my daughter was old enough to sit up in a chair by herself. She made such a mess when she first learned how to eat on her own and I never acted too patiently about it. Even before she died I found myself fussing at details like that, trying to trace a line from how she fell apart to something I’d done when she was still a child. Somebody is always to blame and most of the world tends to agree it was the mother.
How do I know I’m a true New Yorker? I actually believe the city goes quiet at night. Sonia used to have trouble sleeping because we lived next to the BQE and all night she heard the trucks and cars speeding by, but by the time I had her I’d long learned to tune that stuff out. It was only if I got in bed with her, like if she’d woken up and couldn’t get back to sleep, that she’d point out the noise and I’d finally hear it.
Dinner done I wash the dishes and pop the cork back into the wine. I can’t even claim I tasted the food. The apartment has one long hallway with rooms branching off from it. I pass Sonia’s old room. The door is shut. I never open it anymore. In the bathroom I take a slow shower, putting in the time to wash my hair, a nice way to slow myself down. My bedroom is at the end of the hall. I get in bed and turn off the lamp by my bedside and I listen to the sounds of this city.
Miscreations Page 13
