In Veritas

by C. J. Lavigne

  Verity is awash in understanding—things that are and are not, things that can and cannot be. She can’t see into the darkness, but she knows the hall stretches a long way before it turns at a near-perfect ninety-degree angle inside the wall of the old theatre. She knows that the same happens behind. “Between,” Verity breathes.

  The magician says only, “Yes.”

  Verity faces the spot on the wall where her name is still written in dripping gore. She frowns at the bare slats of wood; the light behind casts her own shadow in front of her. There is no matching outline for Santiago, though he isn’t far from her left shoulder, but the shape of Ouroboros slides and winks on the wall. Verity shakes her head, then turns and walks back down the hall the way they first came. There are few figures to mark her passage; most have melted away, somewhere in the distance of the narrow space. The clay top lies abandoned on the floor. Verity steps carefully past it. She thinks she hears a child laughing somewhere behind her, but she walks only with the magician and the dog, and her path is lit by irregularly placed candles and the occasional mismatched sconce.

  When Santiago would say something, Verity only murmurs, “Not yet.” She barely keeps herself from begging. The hall is long and Santiago remains silent, though the dog brushes against her.

  Finally, she reaches the door and stands before it. It has the look of a farmhouse door: broad wooden boards streaked with worn red paint, warm and incongruous in the dimness of the strange space. Verity touches two fingertips to a smooth knot in the wood, then shakes her head and shifts her index finger an inch and a half to the left, gripping the brass knob. “Here,” she asks, but it isn’t really a question. In the act of opening the door, she finds she has already slipped through. She has and has not moved.

  There is a space there that she cannot describe. She knows there is a door in the wall. She knows also that the wall is solid, a mass of drywall and wood, wires and insulation. Things that are and are not, she thinks, and the dog is a snake.

  When the world re-aligns, she stands in the dingy closet, only shelving behind her. Glowing candles illuminate the bucket of water where her cell phone drowned. The air is too close; Verity shoves at the door, finds it unlocked, and strides through the lobby. She suddenly wants nothing more than to be outside.

  The glass doors are unlocked too, crusted with the whisper of paper flyers. Outside, it’s night, and the air is chilled; Verity stops on the sidewalk. She has no jacket and no scarf, and her torn shirt is covered in crusting blood. She measures the black sky against the clotted stickiness of her buttons, and wonders what time it is. She has the fleeting impression of half a breath, or a star’s lifetime.

  A moment later, Santiago stands beside her. At first, she thinks Ouroboros has vanished, but in the glow of the nearest streetlight, the puddle of darkness at the magician’s feet blinks golden eyes at her before settling into a perfect mimic, like any other shadow.

  The magician settles his coat over her shoulders. The leather of his jacket is cracked, but warm and heavy. “You’re going to get us arrested.”

  “Sorry.” Verity is looking at the ground, where the length of her shadow crosses Santiago’s boots, mingling with Ouro. She looks up and, briefly, meets the magician’s gaze—directly, steadily. There are no streaks or sounds to distract her.

  She thinks of the woman Jihan, with her steel hair and her eyes like mirrors of hell, and she wonders if the magician’s secrets will be the same. She is curious, but in that moment, not afraid.

  Santiago’s dark illusion plays at his feet but his eyes are real enough—startled, irritated, with unexpected hints of auburn in their depths.

  Verity meets Santiago’s gaze and sees him falter.

  “The boy made everything clear,” she comments. “It won’t last. But I’ve never—I see, now. You can’t really be yourself out here.”

  The magician makes a choked, startled sound, but Verity is not looking anymore. She extends her hand again to touch the wall, where the theatre’s old brick has been spray painted with a slash of bright but now-fading yellow. She adds, with puzzled certainty, “There are twelve thousand, three hundred and forty-five bricks in this building.” And, “It’s very quiet.”

  There are questions she should ask, but the city is crisp and still for the first time in her life, and she can feel the clean lines of her senses slipping from her with each word. So when Santiago might say something, Verity only shakes her head. Pulling the old leather jacket closed over the mess of her shirt, she walks slowly toward home.

  “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant.” -Emily Dickinson

  7

  Consider Jacob.

  Imagine that he doesn’t know where he fits or what he wants to do with his life. Imagine the only constant in his world seldom makes eye contact, seldom laughs, never says she loves him. She twitches; she reaches for things he can’t see, steps around empty air, tells him there are hippogriffs in the canal and the dog down the street has six tails.

  She holds him in the night; she listens to every word he says and tries everything he asks. She brings him soup when he’s sick and coffee when he’s tired. She keeps all his secrets. She has only ever asked him not to lie to her.

  Imagine she comes home with an ocean of blood dried all down the front of her torn shirt. The buttons give way when he rips and he demands to know if she’s okay and what happened. She isn’t hurt. Her skin is smooth and he checks fifty times with his hands, then fifty-one, but she just stands there. All she’ll tell him is that she found out tonight that she doesn’t want to die. She sounds surprised about that, maybe a little pleased. His heart drops through the bottoms of his shoes and he grips her arms like she won’t be real but she is, and she’s smiling but she’s looking at something that is maybe just over his left shoulder.

  “Will you use the internet for me?” she asks.

  She doesn’t like the internet.

  He wants to say what the fuck, Vee or maybe what happened again or maybe even no, because her skin is stained red and now so are his hands. His palms are sticky with someone’s blood.

  He says, “What do you need?” like it’s normal, and he’s kind of proud of how he isn’t panicking right now. She touches his hand.

  “The Between,” she says. “I think it’s a band.”

  Consider how Jacob feels at that moment. Even if this isn’t about him.

  COLIN

  The story of the boy with the fractured smile starts before he was born.

  His mother was an artist who lived in a commune in southern California. She inhabited a small tent at the edge of a forest, in a row of other small tents, close enough to the trees to hear each leaf rustle. She sold paintings to tourists; she read books and played music and enjoyed the sun on her skin. She avoided plastic and processed food and neoliberal capitalist systems. She didn’t have a television. She didn’t intend to have children.

  She knew the exact day her son was conceived. It was May Day, and there was a great pole, wound round with ribbons, erected in the centre of the clearing in front of the little tent village. Someone had arranged for a busload of tourists to come through. Colin’s mother—her name was Sarah—sold three watercolour landscapes and counted it a good day, then she lay in the grass and drank wine until the music started. A friend took her hand and coaxed her to dance around the maypole. She danced with a young man who drew her picture in the dirt with a sweep of his toe. She danced with a woman whose long red hair was the same shade as her own. And finally, she danced with a man who had the bluest eyes she’d ever seen, which was the only thing she ever said about him, later.

  Blue eyes, she would tell young Colin, when he was a child at her knee. Like the sky, like the sea, like yours. And he laughed like violin strings in the wind. Colin always wanted to hear more, but that was when his mother’s attention would drift elsewhere, and she would shiver.

  The eyes were what she remembered best, but she thought the man had been beautiful. His skin was tanned; his hai
r was thick; the bones of him were lean and strong, and when he pulled her—laughing—toward the forest, many of the gazes that followed were jealous and knowing.

  He took her into the trees and laid her down on a bed of moss. He whispered in her ear, and she wasn’t sure of the language, but she knew it must be poetry somewhere. She laughed up at him and the light came through the branches and made a halo of his hair.

  She remembered the quick flash of his teeth. “Living in tents. Do you people even know who you are?” She remembered the moment when she stiffened, afraid.

  “It’s okay,” he told her. “I’m going to make an angel.” (He was sad, she said years later, puzzled. But laughing. He held me like I was a trophy, or a jewel, but I think, my darling, he meant that for you.)

  She didn’t remember the rest of it; she only knew, she said, that the man whispered, “His name is Icarus.” Then all her world went light.

  She woke alone under waving tree branches, with dead leaves stuck to her skin and mosquito bites studding her reddened flesh. Her friends were calling her name.

  It was two months before she felt the first stirrings inside, but she spread her palm across her bare stomach, there in the dirt on the forest floor, and she knew. (Or so she claimed later. At any rate, Colin liked that part of the story. He was less fond of the way his mother’s hands shook when she told it.)

  She took vitamins; she stopped drinking coffee. At first, she went to the doctor, but the doctor drew her blood and made her pee on a stick and then shook his head sadly. She went away with her hand cupped over her abdomen, her hair a little wild and her knees quivering.

  “I’m pregnant,” she whispered to her friend Véronique, who lived in the tent next door and who made some small living as a midwife. Véronique laid her hand on Sarah’s flat stomach and frowned, but she brought Sarah flowers and little packets of tea.

  At three months, Sarah could feel a swelling in her gut but her body was soft and lean as a prairie field. She went to the doctor again, and a man in plain nurse scrubs ran a wand over her belly. She thought she could see an oscillating image on the screen, some strange jellybean shape, but then the speakers squealed like a dying drum and the monitor faded to static. Calibration issues, the nurse told her, and he pecked at keys, but then he shook his head and sent her away once more.

  Her stomach hurt. She didn’t go back.

  She retreated to her little tarpaulin home by the trees. She tended her garden and worked on her art. By six months, she was awkward, unbalanced by the hot weight she could feel nestled just under her ribs, kicking at her and turning restlessly beneath her palm—but her clothing still fit, and though she twisted and turned in front of her small mirror, she could see no bulge. “I’m pregnant,” she told Véronique again. “The baby has hiccups. It’s been driving me nuts all morning.” Véronique brought her a posset for her trim belly.

  The colours in Sarah’s work grew wild and bright. She made wide slashes across the canvas. She sold a lot of paintings. She put the money into a college fund.

  Véronique was a midwife again—for Sarah, on a chill winter’s afternoon when the sun’s light glared white and frost threatened at the edges of the forest. The entire affair was surprisingly painless, at least for the mother, who insisted afterward that she’d felt nothing but a butterfly flutter within, even when her still-slender flesh tore at the awkward, forceful passage of her young son’s sharp body. He came into the world already breathless, tiny lungs labouring, tiny eyes squinched shut.

  He had ten fingers and ten toes and two wings, curled tight and small to his shoulders like the plucked wings of a chicken. When his mother’s panting exertions finally thrust him into the midwife’s waiting hands, he came with one leg twisted, caught somewhere in the walls of the birth canal against an unforgiving pelvic bone. His skin was translucent, stretched over blue veins; he weighed almost nothing. Like a sunbeam, Véronique said later, her voice soft and her worn eyes suddenly dreamy. Like a feather made of light.

  Véronique had no time to exclaim over impossible babies with curling wings, not with the boy’s knee wrenched at such a sharp angle to the left and his skin going blue beneath his coating of blood and slime. She whispered a prayer to private gods and rubbed the child sharply down until he finally squalled, then she put his blanket-wrapped body in his mother’s waiting arms and looked about for something to make a splint.

  “His name is Colin,” said Sarah, her fingertips gentle on the faded wool of the blanket, “after my grandfather.” In her head, she heard Icarus and I’m going to make an angel. She bit her lip against the sudden, fearful taste of rebellion. She held the tiny bundle in her hands, and for a brief moment, she wanted very much to scream, or to laugh, or possibly both, but the baby opened his eyes just then and she was lost in a blue deeper than the sky.

  Véronique said, “We should call an ambulance,” because there was too much blood on the sheets and the little boy was too small and his bones weren’t set right. There were limits to what she could do, there in a flapping tent at the edge of the trees.

  “We can’t.” Sarah stuck her finger into the swaddle of blanket at the baby’s shoulder, wriggling it into the space between soft folds and softer skin. The baby was sticky with the remnants of his birthing gore, and still felt like a whisper of springtime. She stroked, wonderingly, at the frail bone of his wing, featherless as a new-hatched bird’s. “And we can’t stay here.”

  She thought of the hospital, and scalpels, and the cold severity of needles and microscopes. She looked up to search the round nutmeg face of Véronique, who was her friend, and sometimes more.

  Véronique was the one who tucked them into a rattling station wagon and drove them away in the night, Sarah bleeding and the tiny bundle of life gasping in her arms.

  That was how Colin Icarus Warner came to grow up in a small house on a cliff’s edge between the ocean and the woods, watched by two doting mothers, as far from tour buses and vacationing photographers as could possibly be arranged. He was a sweet baby; he never cried. At first, Véronique thought something was wrong with him, but she poked and prodded and studied, and eventually had to shrug, “I think he doesn’t like to bother us.” She smiled when she said it, though, and tiny white fingers were wrapped around her hand.

  It wasn’t easy having a child who never cried. They didn’t know if he was hungry, or tired, or in need of changing. Sometimes Sarah would feel the wrench of memory tearing at the flesh inside her; after the baby, she was tired. She ached. She bled and never quite stopped bleeding. Still, she held her son and warmth suffused her; he would smile, and reach for her necklace, or the flower in her hair.

  They waited for him to perform miracles. But Colin grew like any other baby, save that black feathers sprouted from his wings—downy at first, but inky and smooth by the time he could gurgle his first words. “Mama,” he cooed, and the feathers at his shoulders glimmered with hints of greens and purples and blues in the light, like the sheen of gasoline on water. He was a pale, fragile child. His eyes stayed a deep, innocent blue, the shade of a newborn babe’s, unchanged with the passage of time.

  Sarah would lie at night with her back pressed to Véronique’s, her womb aching inside her. She knew the stranger in the forest had torn something open, had planted his parasite where her life used to be. Still, when she couldn’t stop shaking, she would get up and lift her angel child from his crib; he would smile the sweetest smile, and when she took him back to bed, he would snuggle into her shoulder and she would know he felt the warm glow of the connection between them. They would be soothed and safe.

  “Do you think he’ll fly?” asked Véronique idly one morning, when Colin was doing his very best to stand, his wings spread and his hands latched onto the edge of the kitchen chair. His leg, twisted at birth, remained so, the left foot curving in and the muscles withered. For the first few years of his life, he would pull himself along the floor or hop in a sort of tripod crawl, wings flapping like a wounded bird. He neve
r complained. When he was a little more than two, he found a worn branch at the edge of the woods and used it as a crutch.

  On the days when she wasn’t too tired, Sarah taught him colour and laughter and history and math. Véronique buried her hands in the garden and taught him herbs and poetry and a little French, the rough Québecois of her homeland. They both taught him to hide from strangers, and to wear a big coat, so he could tuck his wings away on any rare moment when a car might wander up the unpaved road from town. Véronique made the first coat when he was three, and bigger ones as he grew; they were patchwork and ragged, but he knew the drill. An unexpected car, a hunter, a tourist, a family at the beach—Sarah lived in dread, imagining betrayal from every passing plane.

  “But why?” asked her son, when he was old enough to ask. The childish exasperation in his tone was the closest he ever got to complaining.

  “Because you’re different,” she said. “Because they wouldn’t understand.” She eyed the sailboat bobbing in the offshore distance. “Go!”

  So Colin threw the coat over the folds of his wings and fled limping for the trees, where he would hide with his breath panting warmly and ants crawling across his sweaty skin.

  Why was his favourite word. Scientists, he was told, and circuses. Sarah spoke of petri dishes and Véronique of microscopes; when little Colin woke crying, though, he said he dreamed of being caught in a birdcage, trapped behind unforgiving bars. He burrowed into Sarah’s shoulder and clung there, tears soaking her chemise.

  Colin was a sickly child; his fair skin blistered in the sun. When he was five, Sarah would watch as he limped his way over the grass and down the rocks to the shoreline; he spread his wings for balance at the ocean’s edge, and beat them as hard as he could, but the waves washed cold over his bare feet and he only staggered in the wind.