It all rang gloriously true in my ears. Thanks to my stories, the Gatherum was much more than the sum of its parts, she said. It was a real movement now, a force for change. Changes that will trickle down to the survivors, too, enable them to re-enter the world on a whole new footing. I wanted to believe her.
“It’s fearsomely awesome and awesomely fearsome,” she said. “It’s the future.”
I couldn’t wait to tell Marvin—surely this would convince him that the Gatherum-ti-dums weren’t all bad. But we were both busy. He had other friends, people I’d had no time to meet. Plus he was writing his term papers—as I should be now that I didn’t have Trudy and Lara to do it for me. Finally I bribed him with lunch on the pretense that we could talk about what we were both planning to do in the break.
The student union was less than half full. Decorations festooned the Corso and a Christmas tree had been put up and strung with tinsel in the dining hall. I picked him out from the sparse crowd but at first he looked right through me. Then he shook his head like someone waking from daze.
“I didn’t recognize you,” he said lightly. “You look different.”
I brought my hand to my hair. “It’s straightened,” I said. “Sasha got a two-for-one deal at her salon.”
“It’s not just the hair. Found the missing sister yet?”
I said I felt her close.
“You sure you’re not lost in the chase, Dorothy? Gone native?”
“We couldn’t go native if we tried.” I tried to keep my voice even to hide my doubt. “It’s you I’m worried about.”
We’d loaded our trays with tacos and found a table by the window that looked out on a rainy strip of the Corso. The bookstore across the way was advertising a sale.
“You’re really staying? It’s not safe,” I said. “You should leave with the others.”
“Where would I go?” He sprinkled hot sauce onto his plate.
“Back to the Rim,” I said. “Don’t you have anyone there?”
“Not anyone who’ll have me.”
After a silence, I told him what Pagan had said about the future, and how it was fearsome.
He wore his unkempt look well—the Goodwill sweater beneath frayed suspenders, the tousled silver hair that he cut himself.
“I see him here, Meera. I feel him in the air. In the attacks. In the empty Corso, I see his ghost.”
“The Father?”
“Who else?”
Because there was someone—the Father was not working alone. If he were, I reasoned through my hangover and need for sleep, the Mades he attacked would all be dead.
No, he wasn’t quite himself after all. The bridge glowed its lies. I had to get it right. There’d be no second chances.
After the afternoon class, I went up to my room to work on a new story. Marvin’s notebook was almost full and I ran my hands over the faux vellum cover that had once felt so icky, but which I now carried like a second skin. Once I had the bones of the tale, I decided there was enough time to visit Trudy in the clinic before coming back to try and catch up on class work. On my way to the infirmary, a movement in the distance on the track beside the river caught my eye. I stopped to peer between the Towers. It was two figures walking toward each other. The reason they caught my eye was because one of them wore a Goodwill sweater too large for him, and had an unmistakable shock of silver hair, and the other carried a bike helmet under his arm. They met almost smack in the middle distance between the two buildings and then they continued together around the peninsula out of sight. You didn’t need eyesight as good as mine to see that they were holding hands.
When I got to the college clinic, the nurse told me that Trudy had been transported to another hospital, the whereabouts of which she was not at liberty to disclose.
CHAPTER 24
THREE WAY
One late afternoon, almost two years after the Blood Temple has been dismantled, I am in Norman making a delivery and I stop for a beer at the Five-Legged Nag. There is another pub in town, the Excelsior, but it’s not for the likes of me. From his place behind the bar, Three Way tells me about an arrangement between South Rim and Upper Slant offering cult survivors scholarships to undertake study at select liberal arts colleges. The tuition part of the scholarship alone was worth forty thousand dollars.
The pub has gone silent, all eyes on me.
“Why would I care?” I ask.
“Just in case, on account of you being one of them bitzers. It’s a good deal for the likes of you.”
“Not cool, Three Way,” warns a bush elder.
“Who you calling bitzer?” I get to my feet, accidentally knocking over a chair.
The men laugh and make way for us, wiping beery hands over wife-beaters, fat tongues lolling in the heat.
“Half-human, half-computer. Which part of you is which?” Three Way says, grabbing at his crotch.
“I’m no more a bitzer than you. Or you. Or you.” I lurch around the room with my arm extended like a truth or dare spinner. The bush elder’s father is First Nations. His mother’s Archipelaga. A sales rep with a case full of sunglasses is half Upper Slant, half Old Sumneun. The cook has a titanium knee and hair extensions. “And you, Three Way, your old man’s a front row forward and your mother is a Merino-cross.”
The pub erupts in laughter, and Three Way’s fleshy face reddens. It’s a small town.
“This is your chance, darlin’,” he says later, after shouting me a pint. He tells me how after the cult closed down and they seized all the evidence and the embassy was flooded with extradition requests, NATO suggested Redress as the best way forward.
I say, “If I gave a shit, you’d be the first one I’d give it to, Three Way.”
But this time, I’m lying.
“The government shut down the weapons testing base. And there’s a federal inquest, ongoing, into how a cult like this—for ten years—a whole generation of kids, could have happened right under the government’s nose. Who looked the other way? Who was in on it? No secret that a major cash injection would have been a way for this shitty little country in the middle of nowhere to stand out and be counted.”
Like Narn’s jealous, bitter middle sister, I think, castaway between the devil and the deep blue sea. I haven’t been following all the developments—why would I want to? The Father is dead and that is all that matters. But I pick up news whenever I come into town, or whenever Narn’s customers talk about it. The elder chimes in how survivors of the unlawful and inhumane Augmented Reproductive Technology have been guaranteed refugee status under the terms of the War Convention. All refugees from the Blood Temple Paradise Cult are encouraged to seriously consider the Redress Scheme. “Not to be viewed as exiles in any sense,” the elder says. “Safe return to country of origin also guaranteed under the terms of the convention.”
He adds that the whole country’s in turmoil after the revelations. “You’d think they’d have learned by now.” The bush elder shakes his head, shaded beneath the brim of his hat.
“Also I heard that the safety of any survivors who don’t take up the offer won’t be guaranteed,” the cook says, leaning through the pass window to reach for her cigs.
“Cause of what they reckon will be a backlash,” Three Way says, “Copycat cults, paranoia and the like.” He points to an article in one of the tabloids about how the greatest danger is in “remoter regions where the law is less readily enforced, and where vigilante mentalities are easily fostered at the frontier of change.”
“Vigilante?” I say.
“That’s government-speak for dumb as fuck and dangerous as hell.”
“Free money, anyways,” the cook says. “You ask me.”
When I go home and tell Narn about it, she says, there is no such thing as free money and she doesn’t need some limp dick to tell her what vigilante means.
“I’m not
going,” I say. “I’ll never leave you.”
* * *
I sat in the dorm that third December Sunday with Marvin’s bitten-down pencil and the notebook open to the last blank page. Here the coded indentations were faint, but I knew it didn’t matter. Enough of Narn’s conjure had seeped in to shield my chimeric soul from the corruption within and without. To bring me to this point. To this page. I closed my eyes, waiting for scraps on the cutting-room floor of my memory to reassemble themselves into a story. A spin-off. A sequel or a prequel or a tie-in. Don’t panic, I told myself, it will come back. It always does.
And it did.
The last story I “read” from my notebook at the Gatherum was a killer—at the end of the world, two little pink fairy princesses hold hands and with their passerine claws they cut each other into pieces and eat each other all up until there is only a morsel left, a tiny crumb of poison princess for a demon bird to find. The demon bird of memory.
Regulars stood in the hallway outside the turret room, craned their heads to hear, to see me. The applause was deafening. Even Sasha came to the after party at Sweeneys, stayed for one drink and to watch me dance. The strobe light turned us all into ghosts, and from somewhere in the shadows another watched too, and I also danced for her and for lost sisters everywhere. And when the music stopped, they were both gone.
It ended, as it began. In FiFo.
The last days before the holiday were passing in a blur, between classes and end of term assignments. In the empty windows of the Yoga studio, I caught a glimpse of my tamed hair—on Pagan’s advice I’d found a moisturizing conditioner that worked wonders—and my newly purchased push-up bra gave me curves that became me. I was thin as a reed, beak-nosed, one eye like broken glass, the other like river mud.
Of all the classes I had regularly struggled to attend, the worst was FiFo. It was Corby—his relationship with Marvin made it too close to home. I didn’t think either of us could be objective. But I needed a pass in all my subjects to get my B-plus average or I’d get kicked out of the program—couldn’t risk that now that I felt so close to finding Tiff. I wasn’t sure how much time it would take and I couldn’t let another Made go down. Narn had given me all she had—it was what I did with it now that mattered. A part of me thought that Sasha would pull some strings, but Marvin warned me against taking her for granted. “What fearsomeness giveth, fearsomeness taketh away.” So for this last class before the break, I’d cobbled something together in my notebook that I figured would get me a pass. I had no choice but to go.
I crossed the Quad. If Hunter fear had emptied the village, Wellsburg had gotten the spoils. Sasha’s Gatherum was now an official patron of the arts at the university, responsible for what was being referred to as the Wellsburg Renaissance. Repairs to the clock tower were underway. A new Institute for Brain Studies was planned near the Founders Church. The site already being cleared for construction, the air ringing with fallen trees. Sasha Younger pictured everywhere donating to this or that cause. The youngest alumna ever to sit on the Board of Directors. The youngest majority shareholder of Wellsburg itself.
And all because of me. A humble Made, whose stories were the new heroin, the bloggers gushed, except perfectly legal!
A bejeweled Christmas tree rose two stories high between the fountain and the central arches of the Quad. I had never seen one like it—freshly cut from the forest along the river, fragrant and dripping with light. The sheer wonder of it made my jaw drop. I remembered the tree in Norman. A moth-eaten artificial they dragged out every year and decorated with faded baubles and strands of LED lights from the supermarket. A beer-can star on the top buffeted by the dry summer winds.
The Writing and Culture Office was shut. I could hear Pagan rustling around inside, her cold voice on the phone and the clink of a fork, something scraped into the trash. I climbed the stairs past the leadlight window of Adam planning to knock Eve up as soon as they got out of Paradise. For her sins.
Corby sat in brooding profile at the oaken table. His bike helmet was on the floor beside his backpack and he appeared to be wrestling a legal pad with two bearish paws. Seven or eight students sat around the table, reading through their pieces or tapping on their phones. Notebooks open and at the ready.
I emptied my backpack. My notebook wasn’t there.
“A writer’s soul is in her words, her humanity on the page,” Corby said. “It comes from here”—he tapped his head—“and here”—he tapped his heart. “And this”—he tapped the legal pad with his pencil—“is the bridge between the two.”
“I can’t find mine,” I piped up. The last I’d opened it was at the Gatherum.
He ignored me. “Stories are the bridge. Write about a fatal injury.”
Someone wagged their wrist back and forth in a jerking-off gesture. Glances were exchanged in confusion. A few walked out. The remainder reluctantly turned their notebooks to a blank page and began to write.
“Wait.” I grew hot in my new angora sweater. “I must have left it somewhere.”
Where? In Sasha’s turret? At Sweeney’s? I began a kind of spinning chair-dance, ducking under the table, pivoting to the wall, checking my satchel. The thought of my scribbling, my weapon, my conjure—Dani’s feather—exposed! To my dates! To Sasha! It was unthinkable. I needed that notebook. I was literally lost without it.
“Write on this.” Corby tore off a sheet of yellow paper and slid it across the table to me. Kept his big brawny hand on it for a moment before letting it go. “You don’t have much time. None of us do.”
CHAPTER 25
LAST SUPPER
Once my application to Wellsburg’s Redress Scheme is accepted, time literally flies. The sky is a shifting schematic of migrating cockatoos, Eastern Koels and curlews. Narn wants to have our last meal together in Norman. I don’t think it’s a good idea. There have been a number of vigilante attacks against Mades, some rapes. With impregnation impossible, the repercussions are even less than they are with regular women. But there are uprisings on both sides. Marches accusing the government of not offering enough protection. Religious uprisings calling us abominations. Witches.
I say that I just want us to be together at home, at the little kitchen table as always. Narn knows I love her now, that we are a family—her, Mag, Eric, even the hungry-baby ravens—but that it is Kai who is hardest for me to leave. Maybe that’s why she says, “Easier in town.”
“Will we go to the Nag?” I say doubtfully.
“Excelsior!” she says.
I wasn’t expecting that. The Excelsior is the fancy pub. For white men and loose women. But Narn says every time she has one of Three Way’s frozen pies at the Nag, she has to eat nothing but blackberry root for a week afterward. There is an Old Sumneun restaurant at the Excelsior. She has never had Sumneun food.
“Might be fun.” I don’t want to deny her this. Like me, Narn hasn’t been the same since Tiff led the unmanned Assistant to us, sniffing out vengeance. The news of the Father’s death perked us up, but that doesn’t change the fact that she’s getting old, and must cut me loose.
We take the truck. It is a warm evening and we leave Mag and Eric to guard the place. Narn has at least one knife concealed in her tunic, and on the jump seat is a preloved 20-gauge I exchanged with a customer for two rare Golden Seal roots. Vapor trails bloom across the indigo sky like the rarest foliose lichen.
Norman is a zig-zag main street that melts into sand plain at either end. There is a post office, a feed ’n’ seed, a gun store and hardware store, a few scattered shacks, two pubs and a chemist-cum-grocery store with a petrol pump to one side. The worst thing about the town is an old wooden church, and a cemetery which contains a scattering of limestone and granite markers overgrown with X. borealis and less rare Rim lichens. Some witch-hunter from bygone days has graffitied “Vultures from Hell” across the peeling boards.
The Excelsior is a
fine sandstone palace from the settler days when the idea of exterminating all the children of an alien god was still better than sex. We climb honey-colored steps and enter a wide lobby. There is a TV blaring and men sit in a public bar. We pass a ballroom with papered walls and a grand piano. A sepia-tinged chambermaid with a crimson slit across her throat flicks a feather duster at the keys. Her feet don’t touch the floor. Further down the hall, outside the bathroom, an Archipelaga girl in a wedding dress sits with her legs spread pulling a ping pong ball in and out of herself, and I can see the flocked wallpaper through her tiny perfect body.
“So many ghosts,” I say.
A middle-aged man comes out of the poker machine room and there is a bullet hole above his temple and the back of his head his missing. My scalp itches, my legs feel cold. I can hear music from the Nag, where a band is playing. Why didn’t we just go there? A pretty barmaid with green hair is doing a crossword puzzle behind the counter. She smiles at us and points to the dining room upstairs.
“There,” Narn says. “Not all ghosts.”
“But what do they want . . . with me?”
“To see their stories.”
I try to dismiss my resentment, but years of begrudging Narn’s insistent multi-tasking makes that hard to do. I’m here for a night out, not to babysit the dead.
Apart from the clink of silver and the tinkle of glassware, the Excelsior dining room is silent. The tablecloths are the same faded blue as Kai’s hair ribbon and I feel like I might be sick. Diners stare at the one-eyed witch with her dusky ward. We find a table by a window overlooking the street. At Narn’s insistence, I have dressed for the occasion in some of Tiff’s cast-offs—low rider jeans and a tight ribbed top with a sweetheart neck. This is the first time I have worn Kai’s brown shoes because they finally fit. There are still dark patches on them from the blood of the Assistant, and they remind me of what I could have been. Should have been.
Dead.
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