The Bridge

by J. S. Breukelaar

  However I tried to resist them, Narn’s conjure tales worked their magic on me too.

  By the Wednesday of the next FiFo class, my memories of Narn’s story had taken on the sly, patchy quality of nightmare. Scraps of black feathers, the velvet of soiled ribbon and the taste of pennies—nothing that I could assemble into a beginning, middle or end. I nibbled on some vending machine pretzels. My cold had come back with renewed violence. My head was thick, my throat on fire. I doubted everything. I cursed everything, especially my memory. A broken, starving thing.

  I had desultorily attended classes during the week. These included a biology lecture with a lab afterward, mainly showing us equipment I already knew how to use, and a geography class where we listened to a presentation on glacial river formation in Upper Slant. I thought of the vast terminal lake outside of Norman, thirty miles long and almost as wide, but less than a meter deep depending on the time of day. Formed millions of years ago when the earth’s crust rose, blocking drainage from myriad river systems, it filled and emptied over hours and no one knows why. Evaporation and the wind blowing the water back on itself, maybe. Herds roamed across it, sheep and kangaroos. Flocks of black cockatoos nested in the trees at its edge. Brown snakes lurked in the shallows. I came back to hearing the lecturer saying something about icy claws carving great ridges out of the world. His world, not mine.

  It was getting late. FiFo was in just over two hours. I had all but given up trying to make sense of Narn’s story—didn’t know whether to be more disappointed in her or myself. I had attempted to paint my nails, and chipped one of them on a drawer. I would not cry. I did cry. Blotting my mascara, I chose one of the dresses Narn and I had ordered together. I remembered the two of us taking a strange, sad pleasure in the bright colors and fashionable textures—she said the clothes reminded her of Tiff. “Cheap,” she said, “but cheerful.” I stepped into the sturdy brown shoes I inherited from Kai, the ones she used to unman the Assistant. They fit snugly because her feet were always a couple sizes bigger than mine. By the time she died, she was a head taller than me, too. Maybe that’s why she could never meet my eyes.

  The opaque sky hung low over the slate roofs of the old campus nestled behind the dippy tips of hemlock and spruce. The NyQuil I’d chugged made my hands shake over the keyboard. It was already four o’clock and I’d barely written a page.

  The bridge by day was a flat military blue, like Kai’s eyes when she was caught in a lie, even by omission. The Father’s algorithm, his Forever Code, was supposed to make it impossible for us to lie, like a computer. But his fear of multiple births was that repetition would corrupt the compliance with which he’d impregnated us, and Kai was, as Marvin would say, the proof in the pudding. To be clear, it wasn’t that she’d been caught in any lies. Nor had I proof beyond the exchange in our glances that she too could see the little snake girl in the playground. But there was something about how Kai made herself into more than she was that drew me to her, even before I knew she was my twin. Her acting out indicated a second self that she didn’t know what to do with, just as my furtive yearnings and forbidden playmates betrayed memories not my own.

  I think that the Father knew that she was a bad Made, just not why. Why some lady-bits refused to relinquish their horns, no matter what genetic pyrotechnics he performed on them. He took the unmakings badly. They cost him a pretty penny, the Matron said, although pretty probably wasn’t the right word.

  Kai’s unmaking hurt most of all. Kai was the daughter he never had. The only Made who could beat him at his own game. Who managed to find words like “pyroxilic” and “abrogator” in word puzzles or on her tile rack, and who he loved for the very autonomy he had to kill her for. Testing her at everything from chess to crosswords, hoping (he said) to prove himself wrong. Seeing (he said) himself in her, the brilliance of his ART made manifest in her staggering potential to think on her feet. Such a waste, he said, to have to throw it all away. The Father hated waste.

  But had no choice.

  “This will hurt me a hell of a lot more than it will hurt you, you little bitch,” he said, not at all like a real dad.

  I actually pitied him.

  What could I have done to stop it? Wobbling around the darkening dorm in Kai’s old brown shoes that I grew into and never out of, I thought that even if I lived to be hundreds of years old, like Narn, it was a story I could never tell. And I had no other.

  I scraped a brush through my knots. I hadn’t turned on the lights in the room, and in the dark reflection my hair looked like one of the birds’ nests the thylacine would bring home, back in the hills, bucket-shaped and knit with shit and dirt and purloined feathers. Over the crackle of the brush and through blocked ears, I suddenly heard a faint reverberation, a kind of drag on the carpet outside the door. But then a ghostly stain edged into the corner of the mirror, grew a little larger and stayed there. Slowly, gooseflesh prickling, I turned to see what it reflected. Someone had pushed something under the door. The light in the room was dim and I banged my ankle on one of Trudy’s dumbbells. There, on the floor lay a notebook, slim and slightly smaller than an exercise book. I picked it up and leafed through it. The pages were blank. The fleshy cover smelled pungent and had an unpleasant feel to it. I opened it—in the watery light through the window, I saw indentations—as if some sheets had been written on and torn out, leaving their delicate imprint.

  Scribbled in a jagged left-slanting hand across the front page were the words, I hope this helps you find your story. M. p.s. No strings attached.

  This must have been the notebook Marvin used in FiFo before dropping out. I held it at arm’s length. A gift? Gifts were new to me, and I didn’t trust the whole proposition. There was even a pen ring on the back cover with a chewed-up pencil. Did I really want to inherit someone else’s failure? Hadn’t I enough of my own?

  The pale blue pulse of the bridge washed across the paper with its strange ghostly marks. I went to my desk, took the pencil out of the pen ring and scratched it lightly across the first page. I could feel the ridges of Marvin’s heavy hand beneath the feathery line that I drew and the sensation was immediately calming.

  “I have to tell you something,” Kai said before she vanished for good. “Stop crying and listen. There is something that you need to remember.”

  She’d been dead for months, clawed herself out of the earth with intel I didn’t care about, didn’t want to know—it would cost more than I could pay. I held the notebook, feeling the weightless scrawl of Marvin’s soul in my hands, for which he’d asked nothing in return. A gift—no strings attached? I opened it and I began to write. And when I looked up two hours later it was almost dark, and I was ready for class.

  I did not read my story over once I’d written it. Looking back now, I should have—everything would have been different. I think it was partly wanting to get out before Lara and Trudy got back. But mainly, I was so relieved at having written anything, that I didn’t want to risk any further obstacles to my actually getting to FiFo. Something waited for me there, I knew. Something that was . . . everything.

  I felt as nervous and excited about seeing Pagan again as Cinderella, I imagined, going to the ball. I ran water through my hair, pulled the wet tendrils into a frizzy bun at the top of my head. It made me look taller. And my mismatched eyes more noticeable. I stole some of Lara’s makeup—armor, she called it—and smudged eyeliner into smoky black wings.

  I opened the footlocker beneath my bunk with the secret combination. From a tattered purse I drew out a black feather tinged with red and tucked it between the leaves of the notebook. The tip of my fingers brushed against something warm in the purse (a bird in the hand) but I wasn’t ready to take that out. Not yet. The scent of eucalyptus and dirt and unwashed blankets and urine and cheap lotion filled the room. The reek of the ravens. The smell of sisters.

  Of bad blood.

  CHAPTER 7

  FIFO
r />   I can hear the Father’s ravens call from outside—Mades are not allowed out after dark. Narn’s witchy way with pronouns is making me half crazy. There is a revolting cadence to her mutters, a rise and fall that finds its way from my ears to my bowel to my throat, addling thought. I can make out the syllables but not what they mean—they make my belly cramp and suddenly, when I look down, there is blood on the crotch of my shorts.

  I yelp, and wipe drool from my lips. It can’t be. The Father clipped our devil horns so we wouldn’t bleed . . . there! The terror! The Father’s ART must not have worked on me—the shame! I freeze, the blood tracing a roadmap under my shorts and down my thighs: I have a bad womb!

  And then it all makes sense, and Narn’s dirt floor lurches and I have to hold onto the table so I don’t fall. Because if Kai and I are twins, she must have a bad lady-bit too, and what made her kick the Assistant in the thing was the devil himself!

  The beast: it’s in us both!

  Without meaning to I begin a shrill high whistle at the back of my throat. The Father will kill us, bury us in the paddock, feed us to the wild dogs! Narn has begun loading glass vials into the bag’s pouched compartments. Her head turns at my cry and her gaze drops to the darkening stain at my crotch. She drops the jar. It smashes on the floor. The cat hisses.

  “Double-trouble,” Narn says, stepping over the mess. “Boss’s ART won’t work on double-yolker.”

  She quickly rummages in a drawer and comes up with what looks like a white bullet with a string, and she tells me to push that all the way into the hole between my legs. She makes a shoving motion with her finger.

  “Kai too?” I say.

  “Same-same.”

  She points in the direction of the outhouse, tells me to wash up and that I’ll find a change of clothes there.

  “But we’re not meant to be out after dark.” I feel like I’m swallowing my own voice. “The ravens will tell the Father.”

  “Ravens won’t tell.”

  She clicks her teeth and an inky face appears, hooded, in the window frame. Beneath the hood are bloodshot eyes raw as meat.

  Narn inclines her head at the creature and waves a crinkled paper bag for me to bring back the dirty clothes.

  Miserable with shame and nausea, I shuffle to the door, sticky streaks down my thighs, dripping everywhere, clots between my toes. I am too ashamed to cry. Too scared of the pain and color to worry about the creepy hooded person outside. I walk across the porch, not looking to the right or the left and aware of those sores of eyes at my back, mindful of the tread behind me. Up close the creature is bigger than I thought, and broader and more human too, their shoulders sharp jaunts of bone beneath the voluminous hood. Even in my misery, my flesh crawls. I feel a clinging kind of awe, a curiosity as to the actual shape of it.

  Is this—could it be—the other sister?

  The path jumps in my eyes in the deceptive light of dusk. I follow it to the outhouse behind the shed. I close and lock the door, checking for spiders. The whitewashed boards are scrubbed and swept and beside the toilet is an upturned wooden crate with a pair of my sister’s underpants and her shorts on top, both freshly washed and folded as if waiting for me. My heart sticks in my mouth at the thought that she went through the same thing, has been bleeding all along, bearing the shame and fear alone, no one to share it with. I would have taken her pain if she’d given it to me—I would have made it mine. I begin to cry. Why didn’t she tell me?

  To protect me, or herself?

  I wash as best as I can. I finger the plug into my hole with a shudder, wash the blood off. How am I even doing this? I step into the fresh underpants, feeling the secret unfurl inside me. With every cramp I feel a surge of strange power, Kai’s strength flowing into me. I pull her shorts on, and they smell of sun and eucalyptus, and the tears flow anew. I’m not doing this. I am. Big baby tears. I will tell her when I get back. Look, I will say, we’re the same. Different from everyone else except each other.

  I will save you.

  I put my soiled clothes in the paper bag. Outside the ravens roost heavy-lidded in the branches, tatty wings limp. The weird sister’s hooded head swivels to follow my passing, down the path beneath an indigo sky sprinkled with dim stars. Through the window I can see the old woman lighting the candles. But when I get there, the inside of the shed is darker than the night outside. The huge gray cat snoozes in a bed by the fire. The stove is pulsing heat and in a blackened steel pot, something bubbles. Instead of fungus, now the whole room smells like burnt baked beans.

  “How did you make the ravens sleep like that,” I ask, “if you’re not a witch?”

  “Love,” she says.

  “Who is that? Your other sister? What’s wrong with them?”

  She has removed the cloth cap from her hair which is matted and tousled, a pallid echo of the flames in the stove. “Don’t ask,” she says.

  But she is busy. Without the cap she looks younger, capable and strong as a farmgirl. Her garnet eyes fix on me and she holds out her hands for my clothes, opens the stove window and throws them on the fire. She passes me the insulated bag filled with the Father’s order. “Give to Big Boss. Not to little boss, not ever.” Then she presses a small vial filled with powder into my hand. “Take this much”—she indicates the top knuckle of her thumb—“in water every day. Make the bleeding stop. Tell no one.”

  She gives me a paper packet. “Tea for sister’s pain.”

  “Will it stop the unmaking?”

  She looks grim. “Slow him down, maybe.”

  “The Father will know about the blood—he always knows.”

  She gives me three more of those white plugs. “Bury away from dogs and pigs.”

  I wonder where Kai hides the medicine to stop her blood. Where she buries her plugs. My belly cramps and I buckle, darkly elated that the Father’s code didn’t work on us. Kai and I can and do lie and imagine and tell secrets because . . . we are different from everybody else.

  Except each other.

  My mind is racing. Later I will learn that the tea activates a dormant (or damaged) part of my brain unused to asking questions and that questioning does unpredictable things to our artificial layer. It puts it into overdrive and my mind, riding shotgun in my runaway brain, calculates that the hollow tubing of my metal bed frame will do nicely for a hiding place.

  Narn takes the thumb that she used to measure my medicine and makes a slicing motion across her throat, leaving a vapor trail of sparkles that float away toward the ceiling.

  “But—”

  She shoves a black stump of candle at me. “Burn in the window when it’s time.”

  “Taaa-taa,” the ravens call.

  “You have to get us both out of here now.” I steady myself. “Us. Not just her, not just me. Us.”

  Behind her the cat sits up in its bed and starts licking its ass.

  “Burn candle,” Narn says. “Don’t forget.”

  * * *

  After I wrote the story in Marvin’s notebook, I wound my hair into a bun, pulled on a skirt and my thin coat and raced toward the bridge. I balked at the spot where the spiked claws—neither human nor animal—had crooked themselves around the rail. They were not there now—but I knew better than to trust either my faulty imagination or my crappy memory. Best just to pretend they never were. My feet kept moving and if my racing brain calibrated two dark smears at the lower edge of the railing, it stored the image for a rainy day.

  I did not slow until I got to the other side.

  A velvet mystery hung over the cobbled streets of Wellsburg, and it wrapped around me like a cloak. My whole being leaned into the history lurking around the corners, behind the walls, the listing road signs. My soul dipping into a cool clear stream of a reality that I could steal and make my own. I breathed in the truth of this place—smells of coffee and expensive perfume, and sounds of mus
ic and peals of laughter—and felt the cracks inside me fill with possibility.

  I smiled.

  Backlit water tumbled in the fountain at the center of the Quad. It was warmer on this side of the river, similar to September in the Rim, balmy yet with an edge to the breeze. The fickle nature of the weather had revved up my cough, and a few people looked up as I passed, curious maybe about what kind of weak constitution could be unwell on such a night as this? One look at me, at what I was, told them all they needed to know: cult survivor—endangered species. Their faces glowed with health and flawlessly applied makeup—lipstick that never smeared, mascara that never ran. Their expensive, casually assembled couture clung like a second skin. I felt like a plucked bird, a bad joke with my war paint and kohl-black wings, and I kept my head down.

  There were some others like me. Mades and other special-program students from the Tower Village, dancing clumsily to and from electives or from jobs they had in taverns and shops, keeping to the shadows, insisting on their own planned obsolescence.

  I didn’t want to be a bad joke.

  I passed under the maple and through the granite arch to the Writing and Culture Office. Pagan had said that she would be in class. I was counting on that. Walking through the streets of Wellsburg had jangled my nerves and mixed up the words of the story in my head. I wanted to make Pagan believe in me—see that I was real enough to keep. Invisible in the Blood Temple behind Kai’s larger-than-life protection, only half real in the Starvelings where Narn never forgave me for being the wrong half—all I wanted was to dangerously imagine myself through the gaze of another. To prove that Narn was right, after all, not to throw me in the trash.