Ourselves

by S. G. Redling

  “You look so young.”

  She winked at him, a youthful gesture that matched the twinkle in her blue-green eyes. “It’s my life. I’m a meditation teacher. I get to relax for a living and help others do the same. It keeps me young. And you, my young apprentice, need to relax. You have decades to learn and centuries to forget.”

  Tomas threw his arm over his eyes. “I wish people would stop saying things like that.”

  Sylva laughed again and lay down beside him. “Let’s look at the ceiling, Desara. See that plasterwork up there?” Tomas examined the honey-colored swirls. “That looks exactly like the ceiling of the villa my father owned in Umbria many years ago. Sometimes when I lie on this floor, I look up at that ceiling and I’m a six-year-old girl. I have no idea about the woman I’ll become. And in that plaster, I see oceans and stars and faraway lands. I see all the things I dreamed I would see when I became a woman. Now I am a woman, an old woman, and do you know what I see?”

  “No, what?”

  “I see fake plaster.”

  Tomas waited but nothing more came. “Is that supposed to mean something?”

  “No. Just killing time until you’re ready to get back to work.” She laughed and nudged him with her elbow. “Look, kid, you’ve got a lot of years ahead of you, a lot of misery but a lot of joy too. I’ve been working with Storytellers for almost two hundred years. I’m always surprised at the things they don’t tell you. Maybe they want to make sure you take it all seriously. Maybe they figure if they paint a bleak enough picture the good times will be a nice surprise, but there will be good times. Trust me, Desara. If you truly endeavor to feel the people around you, you will know pain. You’ll know betrayal and anger and loneliness but you’ll also know joy. Ecstasy. Hope. All those things that keep our hearts beating, keep us telling our stories and moving our people and raising our children.”

  Beneath his arm, a warm tear slid onto the carpet. “I know I have a lot to do, Mentor Sylva, but could we just lie here for a little longer?”

  “Kid”—she entwined her fingers in his—“that’s exactly what we’re gonna do.”

  “Is there a reason we’re pushing him so hard?” Sylva propped her feet up on her desk. As usual, the Storytellers were using her office as a lounge. She’d left Desara asleep in the meditation room to find Lucien and Dalle sprawled on her couch, their feet on her coffee table.

  Dalle scratched his forehead. “This isn’t summer camp. It’s supposed to be hard.”

  “Oh please,” Sylva said, “let’s not get all military about this. You sound like Vartan.” Dalle rolled his eyes at the mention of the Coordinator. “He’s just a kid. Whatever happened to apprenticing? Letting him work for the Storytellers for a few years before becoming one?”

  “Apprenticing is overrated.” Lucien’s gravelly voice was emphatic. “What else does he have to do?”

  “Maybe have a life? You’ve seen him. He’s exhausted. I mean, how old is he? Twenty-five? Not even? He’s only just left his parents’ house.” Sylva threw a wrapped peppermint at Dalle. “I worked with you when you apprenticed. You were nearly fifty before you reached his meditation level. And you already have him doing memory drills? Pattern recognition? While he’s just learning the stories? What next? Are you going to shoot him out of a cannon?”

  “He can handle it,” Lucien said. “He is handling it.”

  “He is not handling it. You’re going to burn him out.”

  Dalle had scratched a red spot on his forehead. “It’s a tough call. He’s so hungry to learn and he did apply young.”

  “You applied young, and it was years before you were doing what he’s doing.”

  Dalle gave his forehead a rest and folded his hands before him. “He’s just so good. I mean, he’s really good but there’s something—”

  “Something holding him back.” Lucien finished his sentence.

  Dalle nodded. “Something draining him.”

  Sylva snorted. “Gee, I wonder what it could be. Maybe his fifteen-hour training days?” She sat back in her chair, shaking her head. She had an affinity for Storytellers and held a special affection for Dalle but his attitude toward the young apprentice was puzzling.

  Lucien growled. “The girlfriend can’t be helping. At least Vartan’s keeping her busy working with Anton Adlai. He says they make a good team.”

  Now it was Dalle’s turn to snort. “You’ll forgive me if I don’t put a great deal of faith in Vartan’s judgment.”

  Sylva stretched her arms over her head and groaned. “Let’s not talk about Vartan. That officious bureaucrat talks about himself enough. We’re here to talk about Desara, who’s crashed out in Meditation Room Two, by the way. Are you sure you’re not driving him too hard?”

  “I’m not his mentor,” Lucien said. “But if he’s going to fall apart, make him fall apart now before anyone is counting on him. There are no shortcuts on this path.”

  Sylva heard the tightness in his voice and didn’t bother to argue. She was only a meditation coach, not a Storyteller. She didn’t know what it was like to mentor an apprentice but she knew that even now, after four years, Lucien still couldn’t utter the name Hess.

  Tomas heard the shower running when he returned to the room. As he fell back onto the bed, he realized the room had been picked up. There were no clothes on the floor or junk food wrappers in the bed. The sun was still up. It had been days since he had been home before dark. He could hear Stell whistling in the bathroom and smiled when he recognized the tune. It was the theme song to Bonanza.

  “C’mon out, Little Joe.”

  Stell ran out of the bathroom, naked, toweling her hair.

  “Well howdy, pardner.” He sat up and admired her. “I’m pretty sure they never had anything like that on the Ponderosa.” Stell moved to join him on the bed but stepped past him when the phone rang. Before it could ring twice, she snatched the receiver from the cradle.

  “Yes?” Stell turned her back to Tomas and kept her voice low. “Where are we going? Give me five minutes.”

  “Who was that?”

  “It was the bodyguard.” She didn’t meet Tomas’s eyes. “I wanted to go out and he won’t let me go by myself.”

  “Where are you going? Where you fed last night?”

  “Adlai picked out this neighborhood. He said it’d be okay.”

  “Adlai? Is that your bodyguard?”

  “Yeah.” She reached under the bed for her clothes. “He has tattoos. Isn’t that weird?”

  Tomas didn’t answer, only watched the back of her head, remembering Dalle’s words from earlier today. Was it already difficult to look into his face?

  “Stell? I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the Kott last night. I didn’t know they’d send anyone over to us. If I’d known I would have told them not to. I knew you wouldn’t like it.”

  Stell finally looked at him. “I didn’t like it. I’ll never like it. Do you?”

  Tomas shrugged. He wanted to touch her face but didn’t. “I haven’t really had a chance to think about it. There’s so much other stuff.”

  “Yeah. You have a lot of stuff to do.” She pulled her boots on and rose. Wrapping a scarf around her neck, she hesitated at the door. “I don’t know how late I’ll be.”

  “I could go out with you.”

  Stell looked down at the ground. “It’s a motorcycle. He’s already down there.”

  “Yeah, yeah, all right. I’m just gonna crash.”

  “I’ll try not to wake you when I get back.”

  Before he could answer, she was out the door.

  The silence in the room hammered at his ears. All day he had longed for silence and now, surrounded by it, he thought it might make him scream. He crawled back onto the bed and saw the red message light blinking on the phone. Tomas dialed into the message service. Just the sound of Louis’s voice made his heart leap.

  “Dude, we are heading to a place called McGympsies Irish Pub. Find it. Be there or I swear we’re going to storm
the hotel.” Tomas was out the door before the phone hit the cradle.

  They pulled into a coffee shop on the side of the highway. Adlai led her to a booth in the far corner. “What are we doing here?”

  “Waiting for that motel room door to open.” He pointed to the Sunset Motel across the road. “Number two-seventeen.” She wanted to ask him why they were waiting but didn’t want to seem intrusive. After the waitress left, Adlai leaned in. “How do you like Chicago so far?”

  “I haven’t seen much. I’ve always got somebody attached to me. The Council seems to think that movies are going to change my life.”

  “You don’t like movies?”

  She shook her head. “They’re not bad or anything, I just don’t care about them. It’s nothing but commons in them. Why do we pay so much attention to them?” Adlai began to answer but she held up her hand. “I know, I know, Tomas has told me a thousand times. We have to live among them to feed among them. We can’t protect ourselves if we don’t understand them, blah-blah-blah. Are they really that complicated? It’s not like we marry them.”

  “Some do.” He shrugged at Stell’s surprise. “We do what we gotta do. Besides, the movies can be kind of entertaining. And the art and the music. It’s not like we can put out any of our own. The Council would make short work of that.”

  “The fucking Council.” The words began to roll out before she could stop them. “Ever since I ran away everybody has acted like I’ve been freed from some prison. People keep saying how lucky I am and how nice it must be. But you know something? I was freer on Calstow Mountain than I am here. There, I had church and school, but I was free to run onto the mountain. I was invisible. All I had to do was stay out of sight and I could be as free as I wanted. Here? Everybody is always watching. So many rules and jobs and work to do.”

  “Busy, busy, busy. That’s the Council’s way. Takes a lot of work to keep the great Nahan machine running.”

  “Doesn’t anybody not do what the Council tells them?”

  Adlai leaned back and let the waitress set down their drinks. “My folks did. I grew up in the Reaches.” He saw she didn’t understand. “The Reaches? Outside of Council reach? You know, they got their own identities, their own cash. They moved around on their own to stay anonymous. I grew up in New Mexico mostly. My mom was a photographer. She grew up in Boston but the Council got nervous about her success. She wouldn’t stop taking pictures so she took off for the desert.”

  “And your father?”

  “He’s in Detroit, last I heard.”

  “But I thought . . . the Eihl . . . they were paired.”

  Adlai stirred his iced tea with his straw. “Dad always told me ‘don’t confuse biology with psychology.’ Most of the time they couldn’t stand each other, fought all the time. They always said they loved each other in their way and that way was the highway.”

  Stell put her chin in her hands. This went against everything she had learned about pairing and the Eihl. For a Nahan woman to conceive there had to be consistent exchange of blood over a long period of time and, if the pairing was correct, both the man and the woman would become fertile and, even then, only with each other. That the bond could be broken by simple personal likes and dislikes seemed impossible. Was that what had happened with her own father? Had it been no more complicated than a common’s divorce?

  “There’s so much I don’t understand.”

  “Then ask.”

  “Yes, and when I ask you roll your eyes and talk to me like I’m stupid.”

  Adlai tipped his head at her.

  “I mean, not you but—”

  “Your boyfriend.”

  “Tomas. He gets really impatient with me. Like it’s my fault I’ve never seen television before or seen the Superman or worked a microstove.”

  “Microwave.”

  “Microwave. See? I just don’t see why any of it is so important. And if it is so important, tell me before I come across it. Two weeks ago, he shows me the television. He tells me there is news and show games and sit-down comedies and I have no idea what he’s talking about. But I listen and I try to keep it straight because I’m so bored in that hotel room and I hate the woman they sent as my chagar, my escort.” She slapped the table, her frustration making English harder to form.

  “So I am watching the television and there are men stealing horses. That is very serious. Tomas comes in and I tell him and he laughs and says it’s something called Bonanza, that the men aren’t real and the horses aren’t being stolen and he looks at me like I’m an idiot.” She began to shred the paper napkin under her drink. “I mean, now I understand that it’s just a program, but I thought it was where the true show was, the news thing. How was I supposed to know?”

  “I gotta admit, I would’ve loved to hear that 9-1-1 call.” He flicked his crumpled straw wrapper at her with a wink. “Don’t worry about it. I don’t think you’re stupid and I doubt he does either. It’s weird to think of all the stuff you don’t know about. Ask me anything.”

  Stell considered him for a moment. “Why do you have tattoos?”

  “That’s your question?”

  “You said anything.”

  “So I did. Well, I just like them.” He pushed up the sleeves of his shirt to show her a series of black intertwined lines.

  “Aren’t they permanent?”

  “For them. Not us. They fade every two or three years. So I keep changing them. I like them. They’re like art for your body.” Without thinking Stell traced a thick black line with her finger. She stopped where the curve of his bicep disappeared under his sleeve. He watched her hand, then pulled his sleeve down. “So now you know where I’m from and what kind of tattoos I have. You know more about me than most of the people I work for.”

  The waitress set down two heaping plates of onion rings. Adlai poured out a puddle of ketchup. “What do you say we talk about something besides me? You got to be curious about more than that.”

  Stell swirled an onion ring in his ketchup. There was something she was curious about but was hesitant to bring up. The embarrassment of the horse rustlers episode was burned into her mind. She didn’t want to be made a fool of again by the television but this particular show was about more than horse thieves and Adlai had already shown more patience than Tomas.

  “Have you ever heard of vampires?” Adlai didn’t laugh, which gave her courage to continue. “I saw this show on the television and it was all about vampires.”

  “What about them?”

  “They’re like us!” Stell caught herself and lowered her voice, leaning in to whisper across the table. “I mean, not exactly because they can fly and stuff and are supposed to sleep in coffins. But still, the whole blood thing, does the Council know about this?”

  He cocked his head to the side and squinted at her. “I gotta tell you, sweetheart, it is outrageous that you have been turned out into the world with so little information.”

  He explained to her what was second nature to any Nahan. Yes, the Nahan were the basis of the original vampire myth, that every culture in the world had some version of it and each could trace it back almost entirely to the Nahan. Of course, these cultures didn’t know the origin themselves and the Nahan had always carefully cultivated the misperceptions, the superstitions. Give them a monster to chase, he told her, and they’d never come looking for you.

  “But in this movie,” Stell said, “they’re monsters but they act so common. The commons loved them and hated them at the same time.”

  “Does that ring any bells with you?” Anton laughed. “Get head, get fed? It’s kind of crude but, you know, the easiest way to eat is to get them into the sack.”

  “But this was different. These vampires wanted to be common. They had these powers, cool powers that I would love to have, like being able to fly. And they can grow these fangs whenever they want. That would really come in handy but all they wanted to talk about was becoming common.”

  “That’s because according to the myth t
hey were common to begin with. They were turned into vampires by drinking vampire blood.”

  “But that’s stupid.” Stell said. “Commons eat steak and they don’t become cows. Why would they think drinking blood would make them like us?”

  “You’re missing the most important point.” He leaned forward on his elbows. “You know what our biggest advantage is over the common? Not that we can mesmerize them or that we age more slowly. Our real advantage is that the common are unable to consider the possibility that they may not be the pinnacle of life on Earth.” He grabbed an onion ring. “They’re so certain that they’re the crown of creation that they have to create monsters to put a face on the abyss.”

  “So who is the crown of creation?”

  He shrugged. “Who says there is one? I don’t think it’s us. I know it’s not them. My vote is for honeybees.”

  “Honeybees?” Stell laughed, thinking he was kidding her.

  “Yeah, honeybees. They work together. Nobody really knows how they communicate. The very essence of their work is the life of this planet. Everything benefits from them being alive, being vital. And the by-product of all their pollinating is honey, the only food that never spoils. Doesn’t that say something for them?”

  Stell put her chin back in her hands. Adlai tossed a bill onto the table.

  “Room two-seventeen. Here we go.”

  McGympsies was packed. It was Friday night and Tomas had to fight his way past a collection of burly rugby players at the corner of the bar to have any room to search. “Tomas! Over here!” Aricelli waved to him and when he was close enough, she pulled him past a dancing couple and threw her arms around him. “You made it! It’s so fabulous to see you again!” Louis jumped to his feet to greet him.

  “Dude,” he shouted over the music, “you look like shit.”

  Tomas knew he had lost weight; his clothes were loose. His hair had grown out to the point where it had to be pushed behind his ears to keep it out of his eyes. It had been days since he’d looked in a mirror but the last time he’d looked, his cheekbones were sharp, his lips pale and chapped, and the dark circles under his eyes set off the angry red rims beneath his lashes.