The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year, Volume 12

by Jonathan Strahan

  I WRITE UP my report that she is not autistic and recommend a psychological follow-up. She might be bipolar. Leo tells me as I leave that the cop who brought her in, tazed her. I never got any sense she was violent. I was certainly never worried about my safety. I’ve done evals where I was worried about my safety—not many—but I take my safety very seriously, thank you.

  I make dinner that night while Matt marks papers. Matt teaches sophomore English at the high school and is the faculty advisor for the literary magazine. For nine months of the year he disappears into the black hole that is teaching and we lose our dinner table. He surfaces for brief periods from the endless piles of papers and quizzes, mostly around Saturday night. He tells me about his students, I tell him about my clients.

  Matt likes Bengali dishes but I don’t make them very often because I didn’t learn to cook until I was out of school. My go to, as you might have guessed, is Mexican. I like the heat. Tonight is carnitas ala Trader Joe’s.

  “What’s this?” Matt asks. He’s sitting at the dining room table, papers spread, but he’s looking at my notes. We’ll end up eating in front of the television. We’re Netflixing, partway through some BBC thing involving spiffily dressed gangsters in post WWI England.

  “What’s what?” I ask.

  “Looks like someone’s writing the Old English alphabet in your notes.”

  I bring out sour cream and salsa and look at what he’s pointing to. “That was my Jane Doe in Inglewood.”

  “She’s a Beowulf scholar?” he asks.

  “That’s Old English?” I ask.

  “Looks like it,” Matt says.

  I HAVE A caseload and a lot of appointments but I call Leo and tell him I want to schedule some more time with Jane even though I shouldn’t take the time. He tells me she’s been moved to a halfway house. It could have been worse, she could have been just discharged to the street. He gives me the address and I call them and schedule an appointment.

  I have to go in the evening because Malni—they call her Malni now—has a job during the day. She does light assembly work which is a fancy name for factory work. The halfway house is in Crenshaw, a less than desirable neighborhood. It’s a stucco apartment building, painted pale yellow. I knock on her door and her roommate answers.

  “I’m looking for Malni?”

  “She ain’t here. She be coming back, you might run into her if you look outside.” Her roommate’s name is Sherri. Sherri is lanky, with straightened hair and complicated nails. “You her parole?”

  “No, I’m a speech therapist.”

  “There ain’t no therapy to do,” Sherri says. “You know she don’t speak no English.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I like your nails.”

  Sherri isn’t charmed by my compliment. But I do like them, they look like red and white athletic shoes, like they’ve been laced up across each nail. I’m terrible at maintenance. Hair, make-up, nails. I admire people who are good about things like that.

  I head outside and spot Malni coming from a couple of blocks. Malni walks with her shoulders back, not smiling, and she makes eye contact with people. You’re not supposed to make eye contact with people in the city. It’s an unwritten rule. There’s a bunch of boys hanging on the corner and Malni looks straight at their faces. It’s not friendly, like she knows them. It’s not unfriendly. It’s… I don’t know. The way people cue looking at people and away from people is something to look for when determining if they’re autistic or if they’re exhibiting signs of psychosis. I’m trained to look for it. Persons on the autism spectrum generally don’t make eye contact. A lot of persons with schizophrenia don’t look at people and look away in the normal rhythms of conversation; they stare too much, too long for example. When I assessed Malni at Arrowhead, she cued normally.

  Malni walks the boys down, looking right in their faces. The boys move out of her way. I suspect they don’t even realize that they’re doing it. I remember her file says she was tazed when police apprehended her. A homeless woman of color speaking gibberish who kept looking them in the face and wouldn’t drop her eyes. Did they read that as aggressive? I bet she didn’t have to do much to get tazed. It’s a wonder she didn’t get shot.

  Malni sees me when she gets closer and lifts her hand in a little wave. “Hi Ros,” she says and smiles. Totally normal cueing.

  I follow her back into the apartment she shares with Sherri.

  “I ain’t going nowhere,” Sherri announces from in front of the television. “I worked all day.” There’s a Styrofoam box of fried chicken and fried rice nearly finished on the coffee table in front of her.

  “That’s okay,” I say.

  Malni and I sit down at the kitchen table and I open up my laptop. I call up images of Beowulf in Old English and turn the screen around so Malni can see them.

  She frowns a moment and then she looks at me and smiles and taps my forehead with her index finger like she’s saying I’m smart. She pulls the laptop closer to her and reads out loud.

  It’s not the same liquid sound as when she talked, I don’t think (but that was two weeks ago and I don’t remember exactly). This sounds more German.

  Sherri turns around and leans against the back of the couch. “What’s that she’s talking?”

  “Old English,” I say.

  “That ain’t English,” Sherri says. It’s like everything from Sherri has to be a challenge.

  “No, it’s what they spoke in England over a thousand years ago.”

  “Huh. So how come she knows that?”

  Malni is learning modern English. She can say all the things that you learn when you start a new language—My name is Malni. How much does that cost? Where’s the bathroom? Everyone keeps asking her the same question, “Where are you from?”

  She keeps giving the same answer, “Here.”

  I pull a couple of yellow legal pads out of my messenger bag and a pack of pens. I write my name and address, my cell number, and my email address on the first one.

  “Hey Sherri, if she wants to get in touch with me, could you help her?”

  I’m not sure what Sherri will say. Sherri shrugs, “I guess.”

  Malni looks at the writing. She taps it. “Ros,” she says. Then the number. “Your phone.”

  “Yes,” I say. “My phone.” It’s my work phone because I never give clients my home phone. Not even my clients who read Old English.

  I think about Malni walking through those boys. I’m meeting with one of my clients. Agnes is Latina. She’s sixty-four and had a stroke that’s left her nearly blind and partially deaf. She’s diabetic and has high blood pressure. She has a tenth grade education and before her stroke, she and her daughter cleaned houses.

  With a hearing aid, Agnes can make out some sounds but she can’t make out speech. Her daughter, Brittany, communicates with her by drawing letters on her hand and slowly spelling things out. I’ve brought a tablet so that Agnes can write the letters she thinks Brittany is writing. It’s an attempt at reinforcing feedback. Adult deafblindness is a difficult condition. Agnes is unusual because she doesn’t have any cognitive issues from her stroke, so there’s lots of possibilities. I’m having Agnes write one letter at a time on the tablet, big enough that she herself might be able to see it.

  Agnes has a big laugh when she’s in a good mood. Sometimes she cries for hours but today she’s good. She has crooked teeth. Her English is accented but she’s lived here since she was thirteen—Brittany was born here and speaks Spanish as her first language but grew up speaking English, too. “Mom!” she says, even though her mother can’t hear her. “Quit goofing around!” She smacks her mother lightly on the arm. Agnes’ eyes roam aimlessly behind her thick and mostly useless glasses.

  Brittany, who is in her thirties, raises an eyebrow at me. Both women are short and overweight, classic risk profiles for diabetes and hypertension, like me. Unlike them, I have really good health care.

  Agnes prefers drawing on the tablet to writing and after twenty
minutes of trying to figure out what Brittany has been asking her, ‘?yr name ?hot or cold ?what 4 dinner’ Agnes has given up and drawn an amorphous blob which is apparently supposed to be a chicken. “Fried chicken,” she announces, too loud because she can’t hear herself well enough to regulate her volume.

  “She can’t have fried chicken for dinner,” Brittany says. “She has to stick to her diet.”

  Agnes says, “El Pollo Loco! Right? Macaroni and cheese and coleslaw. Cole slaw is a vegetable.”

  Brittany looks at me helplessly. Agnes cackles.

  My phone rings. “Is this Ros, the speech lady? This is Sherri, Malni’s roommate.”

  “Sherri?” I remember the woman with the nails painted to look like the laces on athletic shoes. “Hi, is everything all right?”

  “Yeah. Well, sort of. Nothing’s really wrong. I just got a bunch of papers here for you from Malni.”

  “Where’s Malni?” I ask.

  “She took off to find her friends,” Sherri said.

  “What friends?”

  “Her friends from wherever the hell she’s from,” Sherri says. “You gonna pick up these papers or what?”

  I WANTED MALNI to write her story down. She filled almost three legal pads. I didn’t expect her to disappear, though.

  “This guy showed up,” Sherri says. In honor of Agnes I’ve brought El Pollo Loco. Sherri doesn’t really like El Pollo Loco. “I don’t eat that Mexican shit,” she says but she takes it anyway. “He was tall and skinny. He looked like her, you know? That squished nose. Like those Australian dudes.”

  It takes me a moment but then I realize what she means: Aboriginals. She’s right, Malni looked a little like an Aboriginal. Not exactly. Or maybe exactly, I’ve never met an Australian Aboriginal. “Oh, cool, I didn’t know they had mac n’ cheese.” Sherri plunks down on the couch and digs in. “Yeah so he started jabbering at her in that way she talks to herself. Was crazy. And he acted just like she did. All foreign and weird. Then they just took off and she didn’t come back.”

  “When was that?” I ask. My feet hurt so I sit down on the couch next to her.

  “Like, Saturday?”

  This is Thursday. Part of me wants to say, you couldn’t be bothered to call until yesterday but there’s no reason for Sherri to have bothered to call me at all, even though Malni apparently asked her to.

  “That bitch was super smart,” Sherri says.

  I give Sherri twenty dollars, even though she’s a recovering substance abuser and it’s risky to give her pocket money, and take the legal pads and go.

  I call the department of history at UCLA and eventually find someone who can put me in touch with someone at the department of Literature who puts me in touch with a woman who is a Beowulf scholar. Why I thought I should start in History I don’t know since Matt is an English teacher and he recognized the language. Anyway, I tell the Beowulf scholar I am looking for someone who can translate Old English and that I will pay.

  That is how I get Steve. We meet at a Starbucks near campus. Starbucks is quickly becoming the place where everybody meets for almost every reason.

  Steve is Asian-America and very gay. He wears glasses that would have gotten me laughed out of middle school. He is studying Old English and needs money. “I’m supposed to be working on my dissertation,” he says. “I am working on my dissertation, actually. It’s on Persona and Presentation in Anglo Saxon Literature. But there’s that pesky thing about rent.” He eyes the legal pads. I wonder what persona and presentation even means and what his parents think about having a son who is getting a doctorate in English Literature. Which, I realize, is racist. Just because my dad is an engineer and my mother is a chemist and they are classic immigrant parents who stressed college, college, college, doesn’t mean Steve’s are. For all I know, Steve’s parents are third generation and his dad plays golf and gave him a car on his sixteenth birthday.

  “I can pay you $500,” I say.

  “That looks like modern handwriting. Is it, like, someone’s notes or something?”

  “I’m not exactly sure,” I say.

  He eyes me. I am aware of how weird it is to appear with three legal pads of handwritten Old English. Steve may be a starving UCLA student but this is very strange.

  “I think it’s like a story,” I say. “I work for Los Angeles County Social Services. A client gave me these.”

  “You’re a social worker,” he says, nodding.

  “I’m a speech therapist,” I say.

  He doesn’t comment on that. “This is going to take a lot of hours. A thousand?” he says.

  “Seven hundred and fifty,” I say.

  “Okay,” he says.

  I write him a check for half on the spot. He holds the check looking resigned. I think I’m getting a pretty good deal.

  AFTER THAT I get emails from him. The first one has ten typed pages of translation attached and a note that says, Can we meet?

  We meet in the same Starbucks.

  “Your client is really good at Anglo-Saxon,” he says. “Like really good.”

  “Yeah?” I say. How can I explain?

  “Yeah. She does some really interesting things. It’s a woman, right?”

  Malni tells a ‘story’ about a woman from a place on a harbor. The place is vast, full of households and people. There are wondrous things there. Roads crowded with people who can eat every manner of food and wear the richest of dress. It is always summer. It is a place that has need for few warriors. Trees bear bright fruit that no one picks because no one wants it because no one is hungry. The air is noisy with the sound of birds and children.

  She is one of a band of people. They work with lightning and metal, with light and time. They bend the air and the earth to open doors that have never been opened. They journey to yesterday. To the time of heroes.

  “She’s a woman,” I say.

  “It’s like a sci-fi fantasy story,” Steve says.

  I already know that. Malni has been telling everyone, she’s from here. When I read those words, that they journeyed to yesterday, I figured that plus the Old English meant that somehow Malni thought she had gone to the past.

  “Have you heard about anybody who had some kind of breakdown or disappeared in the last year? You know, a teacher? Someone good at Old English?”

  “No?” he says.

  I tell him a little bit about Malni.

  “Wow. That’s… wow. You’d think someone this good would be teaching and yeah, it’s a pretty small discipline. I’d think I’d have heard,” he says. “Maybe not. If I hear anything…”

  “So she’s really good,” I prompt.

  “There are only something like a little over four hundred works of Old English still around,” Steve says. “There’s Beowulf, which was written down by a monk. There’s Caedemon, and Alfred the Great and Bede, a bunch of Saints lives and some riddles and some other stuff. You get to know the styles. The dialects. This is close to Alfred but different. I thought at first that the differences were because she was trying to mimic Alfred but getting it a little wrong, you know? But the more I read it over and over, the more I realize that it’s all internally consistent.”

  “Like she’s really good at making it up?”

  “Yeah,” Steve says. “Like she’s made a version all her own. Invented a wholly new version of Old English so that it would sound like a different person at close to the same time. And written a story in it. That’s a really weird thing to do. Make it super authentic for somebody like me. Because the number of people who could read this and get what she’s doing and also enjoy it is zero.”

  “Zero?”

  “Yeah,” he says. “I mean, I understand the beginning of the story, I think. It’s a time travel story. She starts in Los Angeles, which by the way is really hard to describe in Anglo-Saxon because she doesn’t try to make up words like horseless cart or anything. For one thing, Anglo-Saxon doesn’t really work that way. So she starts here and she travels back in time. Then
there’s all this part about being in the past in what I think is probably Wessex, you know, what’s now part of England. She makes up some stuff that’s different from the historical record, some of which I wish was true because it’s really cool and some of which is just kind of dull unless you’re really into agriculture. Then there’s this long explanation of something I don’t understand because I think she’s trying to explain math but it isn’t like math like I understand math. But really, I suck at math so maybe it is.”

  “She’s got math in there?”

  “A little bit, but mostly she’s explaining it. There’s something about how really small changes in a stream make waves and if you drop a stick in the water, no one can predict its course. How when you walk through the door to yesterday, it means yesterday is not your yesterday. Then she talks about coming back to her beautiful city but it’s gone. There’s a strange city in its place. That city is beautiful, too and it’s full of wild men and sad women. That city has savage and beautiful art. It has different things. Some are better and some are worse but her family is gone and no one speaks to her any more. She says the story is about the cost of the journey. That when you journey to yesterday, you lay waste to today. When you return, your today is gone and it is a today that belongs to somebody else.”

  It takes me a moment to think about all that.

  One of the baristas steams milk. Starbucks is playing some soft spoken music in the background. It doesn’t feel like someone has just explained how to end my world.

  “It’s kind of creepy but the way it’s written there are big chunks that are really hard to read,” Steve says. “Is she crazy? I mean, what’s the deal?”

  I want to say she’s crazy. Really, it’s the best explanation, right? She was a professor of Anglo Saxon/Old English. She’d had a psychotic break. Sherri said a man who looked a lot like her—maybe a family member, a brother—tracked her down to the halfway house and took her home.

  That strange and liquid language she speaks. The way she acts, as if she comes from a different culture where the men are not so savage and the women not so sad.