Distant music played from the Music and Technology rooms. Someone was practicing a strange diminished chord over and over again. I climbed some stairs and passed a landing illuminated by a huge leadlight window that depicted Eve leading a shamefaced Adam from Eden. Laughter tickled down from the level above and I balked. Kai’s ugly shoes echoed on the stairs. The laughter turned to something else. A moan. The stunted arpeggios from the music room quickened. Adam buried his face in his hands.
I wandered down a wide hallway lined with sconces. The ceiling receded into shadow. I smelled expensive weed, and the moan turned to a sob, getting louder as I neared the restroom. I kept walking. Room 225 was to my left. The door was ajar and I stood on the threshold looking into a small classroom dominated by an oaken table which students sat around with typewritten sheets and notebooks like mine. The walls were of age-defying stone and a stern old-fashioned clock hung behind the instructor, the second-hand juddering. I identified two other Mades, but otherwise it was all Regulars. Pagan lounged with her friends, a gaggle of swans with long necks and lush feathers that caught the light. I sat down facing a high window against which the maple branches flung themselves in the rising wind. Sweat pooled at the small of my back.
The instructor was a nervous Made a few years older than me, with emerald streaks in her hair and a small fierce freckled face. She wore a department store Bohemian skirt and earrings that jangled. She nodded at me, checked my name on the roll, and explained the workshopping process for the benefit of the “latecomers.” We would read from our work, she said, and the class would offer their critique, beginning with the student to her left, and concluding with feedback from Jacinta herself. The other two Mades and I avoided eye contact. There was a quota, but I didn’t know how many places were left, and I wondered if they did either. Were we all competing for the same thing—protection? I felt something in me rise to the ugliness of the game.
There were only females in the class. No males. My heart sunk. Was there no damn place in this whole campus where one could meet a nice young drover, take him upstairs into a room with faded wallpaper like in the Five-Legged Nag? Unbutton his jeans before he knows what you are?
Someone read a chapter from the start of a novel about the end of the world. Another student read a poem about antique tools. The instructor made notes in a yellow pad and everyone commented on the pieces, lies mostly, how much they enjoyed it and how they couldn’t wait to read more. The Regulars were looking aggressively bored or were on their phones, and even then I knew that Jacinta couldn’t have stopped them if she tried. Everything about their attitude suggested that they were less students than paying customers, with a line of credit as long as their necks—she served them. We all did. This was the tomorrow we were being re-Made for. I felt my hopes plunge, my power drain.
Pagan had not acknowledged me. The readings were muffled beneath the roaring in my ears. I was rigid with anxiety. A few Regulars read stories about bad dates and true detectives and dead mothers, none of which we Mades knew anything about. I was to read last, and by then Pagan was asleep with her head on her hands and her sandy quiff flopped over her eyes. I almost felt a sense of relief. At least this way, she couldn’t laugh at me. If she laughed at me, I thought I might die.
I didn’t know whether to stay sitting or stand up. I stayed sitting, kept my eyes on Marvin’s notebook, without really seeing it. At first when I began to haltingly read, nothing happened. I knew my lips were moving, but in my anxiety I could hear no sound. Faces turned to me, pale and tense. I was making no sense. It was all just mumbo-jumbo, a bad joke after all. I heard a titter, saw someone swiping the screen of their phone. I stopped rushing. Tried to slow down to make space for the out-of-joint meaning.
Once I asked Kai what we were, exactly. What the fragments of our being amounted to. “Tell me and we’ll both know,” she’d said.
The story I read was and wasn’t the same as Narn told me on the bridge. It was both more than that, and less . . . There is a man with a raven’s head pulled over his own like a mask. He uses his beak to peck the faces off little girls in their sleep. They wake up every morning with something missing—a-tongue-a-tooth-an-eye, and every night the man-raven returns one thing—a nose haphazardly affixed to an earhole, an eyebrow ripped away and replaced with an upper lip—only to take something else instead.
“Their eyeballs,” I finished very slowly, “squish like grapes between my beak.”
Silence slammed down on the room. The clock stopped ticking and it was no longer a clock but a map. Across the map, place names—Demos, Kokylus, Akheron, Elysion—materialized in symbols I didn’t know I knew. The play of moon-cast shadows through the maple branches bounced the map across the faces in the room, refracted contour and form-lines with no earthly reference, the blur of tongue-twister toponyms, impossible sea levels and nightmarish elevations—a shifting restless map showing directions to nowhere. Pagan smiled in her sleep. Another student rushed from the room and there was a bang of the lavatory door, moaning that I suddenly realized I had not so much heard as foreseen. Jacinta, her freckled forehead sheened with sweat, jumped up from her chair and the markings were stark across her face.
“Stop!” she cried.
A door banged again. Open or shut. Giant wings flapped past the window casting the room in sudden utter darkness, and when they passed in the blink of an eye, the map had gone. The clock was just a clock. The faces of my classmates just pale, stunned faces.
“Why should we listen to this?” Jacinta asked, trembling.
“If someone lived it,” Pagan answered without raising her head. “We should at least be able to listen to it.”
CHAPTER 8
DIRTY BERT’S
The night of my disastrous reading at FiFo, a Made was mauled on the Wellsburg riverbank and was now in the hospital fighting for her life. Everyone in Dirty Bert’s the next day was talking about some ragged blade that she never saw coming. In response, bridge curfew had been moved forward to nine p.m.
Marvin was already slurring his words, “You’re drawn to lichen because it’s not a single organism, but a symbiosis.”
“Also, the longest living thing on earth,” I said brightly, trying not to spill the drinks I’d ferried through the nervous crowd. “It can grow on anything. Soil, ice, steel, plastic, air. The bacteria element—the photobiont—takes energy from the sun, which it provides for the fungus element—the mycobiont. And in return the mycobiont gives the photobiont a place to live. It’s speciating without reproduction, see, a two-way deal.”
I’d managed while talking to place our drinks on the table, and to slide along the booth opposite him.
“Mutualistic as fuck.” Marvin gave me a sideways smile. “And this Narn of yours concocted potions from lichen to enable the Father to make his Mades? Whose side did you say she was actually on?”
“The actual word is compounding. And the lichen didn’t enable the Father. It just fed the fantasy that he was creating his own species—without the need for actual women. And while he was distracted with that, Narn sowed the seeds of his destruction.”
“Bwaaahaaa. But he still needed actual eggs,” Marvin said. “From women.”
“Maybe not for long,” I said. “He had his Forever code. And he had . . . the ravens. Or Narn let him think he had.”
I had not thanked him for the notebook. I didn’t know how. I wanted to tell him I didn’t need it now. I wanted to tell him I’d failed FiFo. Failed him. Failed myself. But I was worried that, like Narn, he wouldn’t be surprised.
I ordered fries which were terrible, but he ate them anyway. His stubble was darker than his hair, which would have turned white from shock well before puberty. His flirty smile did not match the deep sadness in his eyes—they ratcheted open in the dimly lit bar, the pupils black as pitch.
“Honestly? I don’t think I can ever go back there,” I said. “To FiFo. But I can’
t see myself lasting here an extra semester, either.”
He licked some ketchup from his patchy mustache. The TVs played their silent gags, and the edgy crowd was overly boisterous and spilling drinks and yelling in each other’s ears. The weather had turned nasty. A cold rain fell, and I regretted not bringing a coat—my chest rattled every time I breathed. “Was it dreadful?”
I shivered. “The worst. People freaking out, running to the bathroom. Others laughing like it was a joke. Or that I’d started a war.”
“Maybe it was. Maybe you did.”
I told him about the hellish map conjured from the innocent wall clock. I didn’t tell him about the dark wings flapping at the window.
“The psychology major in me suggests that might have been a shared illusion. Like collective hysteria.”
I fiddled with my straw.
“The South Rim native in me suggests something else,” he said. “That the map was conjured by some spell your Narn wrote into the story. Or that you did, unconsciously.”
“Unconscious or not, the TA accused me of triggering the more vulnerable classmates, the survivors.”
“I told you there’s a quota, Meera. Everyone’s fighting for the same spots.”
“She warned me to balance my artistic freedom with the appropriate sensitivity next time. But Pagan liked it. I think.”
“Well then.” He sat back against the booth. “You got in.”
“What do you mean?”
“The Regulars are all that matters.” Marvin downed his shot. “The end.”
I thought of the poor Made weeping in the bathroom, and saw that smile playing across Pagan’s mock-sleeping face. The end?
“All of the TAs at Wellsburg are Mades,” Marvin explained. “Not the deans and professors of course—our memory issues naturally disqualify us from tenure-track positions—but most of the lesser teaching jobs, not to mention all of the admin staff. That’s the same on both campuses. Everyone serves the Regulars. Do you really want to get into this, is the question you need to ask yourself. Or are you better to leave FiFo alone, and stay another semester at the end of the program? There’ll be others like you.”
I looked around the soulless bar, the streamlined hell of the Corso through the window.
“There’s no one here like me.” A boisterous caravan of Mades trundled past.
He pointed a finger at his ear, shook his head.
“You said do I really want to get into it,” I yelled. “Get into what?”
“The struggle.” He leaned in closer. “The struggle between those Regulars who are for the Redress Scheme because it provides labor, cannon fodder, funding, test subjects—and those against it because it lowers the tone, muddies the water, threatens the status quo. Transforms a remote campus down into . . . this.” He looked around the room, blew a strand of silver hair off his eyes. “But it’s a pretend struggle. Just to distract us while the real power tightens its grip.”
“The scheme,” I said, “behind the scheme.”
“Bingo.”
I just wanted to get drunk. How did Marvin keep up? I watched as a DJ took her place in a corner of the bar. Her movements betrayed her as a Made but her get-up was a pretty good imitation of the bespoke style favored in Wellsburg—a black crepe mini-dress embroidered with sequins over silk stockings and a garter belt, platform boots. She had pink hair fringed with black. Within minutes she was obscured by strobing hands waving in the air.
My head hurt. “I can’t even remember what my story was about.”
He lifted an eyebrow. “You wrote it down though, right? In the notebook I gave you? That’s important.”
“Yeah, yeah. Because of the memory glitch. But what came out was different. Like it had a life of its own. But it wasn’t real, Marvin. I never lived that. How could I—and still be here?”
I realized with a start that was the point. He watched me. Waited for this to compute. And just in case it didn’t, he said, “Either you lived it and survived, which you say is impossible. Or you lived it and didn’t survive, which means you’re not here. When you clearly are. Or . . .”
“Or . . . it didn’t happen.”
“But it could have,” he said, “which is all that matters. Like pornography, kind of. Want makes it live. Want makes it wet.”
I thought of how Narn’s stories conjoined love and fear, life and death—impossible twins or twinned impossibilities or some obscenity in between. Neither existence nor nonexistence, but a bridge conjured between the two.
Be careful what you wish for.
I said that I didn’t know if that’s what Pagan had in mind.
He smiled a catty smile. “I guess you’ll find out soon enough.”
And then he was off in his thoughts, wherever he went, leaving me alone. Sitting beside him, but he wasn’t there. Until he was.
“Let’s get out of here,” he said like he always did. His silver hair flashed white in the strobing light as I followed him from the bar. We walked back to our Towers along the thronging Corso.
“Where do you go?” I asked. “When you slip away like that?”
“Where no one can find me, I guess.”
“Well, I’m just wondering who’s got your back.”
He smiled and draped a heavy arm over my shoulder. The longed-for physical contact was like an electric shock. “I’m there but I’m not there,” he said. “The me that stays and the me that goes. We keep an eye out for each other.”
Maybe he told me because he knew I’d understand, and maybe I did.
We stopped in a no-man’s-land between two of the Towers, and he rummaged in his satchel, his face lit blue as the Aspergillus mold that would grow on Narn’s dried lichen during the rainy season. “Listen and learn, Dorothy: if enrollments improve across all the electives, Wellsburg will soon be able to reassure its investors and the governors that it doesn’t need the Redress Scheme, in which case it might get shut down, or moved to a different institution. Meanwhile, the Regulars are dependent on it for funds to restore the clock tower, build a new gym behind Old Dorm Hall, the geeky graduates they’ve been trying to lure to their computer labs—there is a worry among some factions that the Redress Scheme is making Wellsburg and all it stands for, dependent on it.”
“So?”
“So, a Wellsburg dependent on the Redress Scheme is a Wellsburg dependent on . . .”
I stared at him. “Us?”
“Bingo. The horror! And while some factions are okay with that, others are not. Surly counter-revolutionary forces for whom mutualism—economic or natural—is an anathema, especially if it also benefits the great unwashed.”
“Mades.”
He had a glass pipe this time and drew on it quickly. I inhaled the heady bite of cheap hashish. “They don’t want us here, Dorothy. The Pagans of the world. However they act as though they do, it’s a lie.”
“Not even our stories? Not even fakelore? She said . . .”
“FiFo is the brainchild of an alumna called Sasha Younger—she’s part of the Writing and Culture faculty but more important, she’s founding family. She has no intention of sitting back and watching Wellsburg, with its history and patrons and secrets, become a decrepit snooze town hooked up to Redress oxygen. We’re a quick fix, Meera. Just so long as you know. When they’re done with you, you’ll be . . .”
Trash baby.
“Dead meat,” he said. Thanks to the Father, obsolescence is built into our system, he said. They needed us now but they wouldn’t always, “by which time we’ll have been seamlessly repurposed, Amen.”
“Hacked, you mean.”
“Gone either way.”
The mica glittered and we skirted lines around the food chains. We walked beneath the fake Zen sign above the twenty-four-hour yoga studio. The rain had lightened but it was still freezing. We slowed, and at the side of my
eye I noticed vertical cuts on the inside of his arms. I thought of those snapping crocodile jaws, what he’d had to forget, but how the shame would snap at him as long as he lived.
“What’s your plan?” I asked.
We’d arrived at my building.
“Survival,” he said. “Where there’s life there’s hope and all that snappy crap.”
“What if this isn’t it?” I hesitated, searching for the right words. “I mean I get that what Mades want right now is a life free of suffering and they’ll do anything for it. But I have no intention of being dead meat, Marvin. And I know you don’t either.”
He made that snapping motion with his hands. “My idea of survival—”
He held the pipe out to me and I shook my head, surprising myself.
“—and yours, are different. Just be careful, is all I’m saying. Make sure that your stories are as smart as you are.”
No one had ever said I was smart before. I invited him up to my room. “You haven’t lived until you’ve tried Narn’s shroom brew.”
“Another night,” he said, turning to go.
“Wait,” I held his arm. “Marvin, someone accessed my Redress application form and altered it. I have to find answers before they find me.”
There were raindrops on his eyelashes. “The answers already know where you are,” he said gently. “Answers always do.”
I trembled a little, knowing he was right. That didn’t stop me wanting, wishing I could magic us both back to the Rim, back to not where it all began, but somewhere in the fleeting safety of the middle.
The Bridge Page 11
