It was the most beautiful place I’d ever been in, and I’d been in a lot.
“Nenner,” said Sangris, who’d been staring at me while I was staring at the jungle. “Listen—I’ll help you. I’ll stick around the oasis. As a cat, or something small, like a lizard. And if you ever have a moment like that again, if your father, you know . . . I can take you away. Anytime you want, whenever you need it. I’ll never be far. I’m your ladder out of the desert, my dear.”
“Don’t call me your dear,” I said faintly.
“I’m your ladder out of the desert, Nenner,” he said, offering me a smile. When I didn’t respond, he rushed on. “Listen, I’ve thought about this. I lead a pointless sort of life. It’s about time I put myself to good use. And—well, that’s not really why I’m offering.” He hesitated. Then he took a deep breath and lowered his voice until I could barely hear it. “You saved me from the souk.”
But his speech was still too much, too sudden. I found myself answering the way my father had trained me. “There’s no need for that,” I said, with vapid politeness.
There was another reason too: I didn’t believe him. Sangris thought promising “I’ll never be far” was enough to solve everything. But it’s impossible for a person to always be there. I’ve moved away from too many countries, and from too many friends, not to know that. And Sangris was a Free person, bound to be unreliable.
He rubbed his head, caught off guard by my reaction. I didn’t blame him. I’d caught myself off guard too.
We were both quiet for a while. I pretended to be very interested in the throbbing red of the butterfly over the river. My heartbeats felt muffled, still adjusting to the change from the claustrophobia of my bedroom. A few seconds ago I’d been so walled in, and now I was in a rainforest—
“I used to live here,” Sangris said.
He was pointing downward.
I looked at him blankly. “What, on the dock?”
“Under the dock. Inside the river. That’s why I brought you here, to show you. I got sick of Ae, the same way I got sick of everywhere I’d ever lived. I’d never spent more than a couple of weeks in one country. So I flew here to the jungle at random, and I forced myself to stay for an entire year.”
“Why?”
“I was hoping that if I lived in one place long enough, it would become a home. Stupid idea, didn’t work.”
He spoke as though this information was somehow logically related to his offer to become my ladder out of the desert. A thought struck me. “You can’t possibly want the oasis to become your home?” I said in disbelief.
“Not the oasis,” he said. I blinked when I realized what he meant. “I mean—getting to know someone . . . That’s almost the same thing as belonging, right?”
I didn’t know what to say to this. Sangris frowned slightly at the curls of humidity sliding over the water.
“The thing is,” he said to the river, “places blur together after a while. Everywhere’s the same. Imagine how bored you can get if all the worlds are scattered like marbles at your feet . . . Free, and alone, that’s the life of a Free person. It’s like flying inside a bubble.”
I hesitated. “It used to feel that way before we settled down in the oasis. When my family moved around a lot.”
“Then you know what it’s like.”
“But I was with my family.”
“Still alone.”
“You’re sharp today,” I said, raising my eyebrows.
“Oh, I know exactly what I’m talking about,” he said, shrugging. “Limitations give things meaning, but Free people don’t have limits. It’s like living without the outlines that would define your shape. There’s no rhyme or reason for us.”
I’d never imagined he would complain about it. “Don’t you like being a Free person?”
“Oh, sure. It has its perks,” he said, still casual as ever. He probably wouldn’t mind if he had been born as a cockroach. “But you give up a lot of things. No ties, no background. You’re always lost—because if everywhere’s the same to you, it doesn’t matter where you are. Free and light as air, and just as empty—” He stopped for a moment. Then he made a small motion with his hand, as if brushing it all aside.
I frowned. Evidently, Sangris wasn’t a cat who could shape-shift. It was more difficult than that. He was a nothing who occasionally pretended to be a cat. “I wish I could know what it’s like for myself, that’s all,” I said. I felt rather the way a jail inmate would if a bird flew up and shouted through her window bars: This freedom thing? Yeah, not so great. “Is it just you? Or do most Free people think this way?”
“No clue. It’s not like Free people organize social gatherings. Lone wanderers, remember? Part of having no species. Though there are exceptions. I have noticed from a distance—among the older ones, sometimes when the coldness gets too much, they try to find some normal species and settle down with them. Once in a while it actually works. With migrating bird-people, normally.”
“Not humans?”
He scrunched up his nose. “Humans . . . ugh. No offense, but your species isn’t very popular.” Then he brightened. “But you, you’re kind of like a migrating bird, aren’t you, Nenner?”
I didn’t say anything, but secretly I liked the idea.
He went on quickly. “Anyway, me, I never did get along well with big flocks. A Free person couldn’t truly fit in. It’s just exchanging one kind of loneliness for another.”
“Ah, so that’s why you don’t have any other friends. I thought it was just because nobody else can stand you.”
For some reason that made him crack into a huge grin. Turning away from the river at last, he looked straight at me.
“It’s just my luck that my only friend can’t show affection in any other way than by insulting me.”
“Affection? Me?” I began indignantly, but he plowed right on.
“And that’s what I’ve been leading up to. You know what I realized that other day in your room, when we made our deal? You’re practically a Free person yourself, Nenner.”
I started laughing. “Are you kidding? I’m the most un-Free person I know.”
“Yes, but how many countries have you lived in? Okay, you can’t fly, and you’re not much of a wild spirit—”
“Thanks a bunch—”
“You’re welcome—but still, I’ve never met a non-Free person so unrooted.”
Smiling, I shook my head. “You mean I have all of the bad bits without any of the advantages.”
But then the thought snuck up on me: It’s true. No human could be more like Sangris than I am. After all, I don’t know where I’m from or what I am; to be honest, I’m not anything at all. I have four passports and none of them mean much to me. When people ask “Where are you from?” the question doesn’t even make sense.
I looked at Sangris with an odd feeling, almost like a shock of recognition. He had no species, but I had no ethnicity. He had no world, but I had no country. Why had I felt amazed that he was a constant alien? I knew what that was like.
His head was bent, and he was looking at me more seriously than was usual for him. The hint of wickedness in his face, the sharp cheekbones and the black straggles of hair, now just gave him an earnest look.
“It’s a weird feeling,” he said, “having a connection to someone.”
And he actually flushed as I stared at him.
“So,” he said, rubbing at the back of his neck, “so, as one foreigner to another, Nenner, now tell me—am I allowed to stay with you?”
I wanted to shuffle my feet and refuse to look up from the creaking wood of the dock. But I thought he deserved a proper answer, especially when he was making so much effort to keep his own eyes steady. So I met his gaze as I nodded. “Let’s go back,” I said. “If you come, I think I can handle the oasis until tonight.”
Before I could even finish the sentence, gravity dropped away. He had scooped me up and we shot into the cool, sticky white sea of the sky again.
&n
bsp; Too soon, I felt myself being lowered back into the tightness and heat.
“Remember, it’s just until tonight,” said Sangris into my ear. “Then we can get out and go somewhere new.”
This time I didn’t say “No, it’s the weekend.” I nodded and we submerged ourselves into the airless oasis.
Sliding back through my window, I was struck by the cold. My room looked so hollow without books. But the next second Sangris distracted me. He shrank into a cat, leaving his uniform in a careless heap on the floor, and I shoved his clothes out of sight behind the bed. I sat cross-legged on the ground with my back against the door. At least, this way, we’d have prior warning if my parents tried to burst in.
“If the door knocks me over,” I said, whispering, “you jump out the window. Got it?”
“Yep.”
My shoulders grew a little less rigid. But then Sangris added: “I promise. Although, you know—”
“No ideas!”
“Just thinking,” said Sangris innocently. The huge black cat flicked his tail and tried to ease himself into my lap. “If your dad annoys you, I could always turn into a tiger and rip his face off. If you want. It’s a possibility to keep in mind, that’s all.”
I tried to picture my father fighting a tiger. Instinctively I felt that the tiger would lose, but I couldn’t quite picture how.
“No.”
“Oh, all right. If you say so,” he said cheerfully, and flipped himself over onto his back. With his paws sticking up in the air that way, he looked like any silly cat waiting to be petted.
Having Sangris in the same house as my father, separated only by an unlocked door, was enough to make my nerves ripple, but it was better than the alternative. While Sangris was here, the claustrophobia couldn’t get hold of me. And even if my father burst in, he would only see a cat, right? I kept my back against the door. Slowly my fear turned to dark-sparkling adrenaline.
“You,” I told Sangris, “are living proof against the existence of a well-ordered universe.”
“Really?” he said, flattered.
“A Free thing in the oasis? Doesn’t make any sense. You’re going to be struck by lightning any minute now.”
“Oh, come on. This isn’t a bad place to be in. As far as prisons go.”
I looked around the room, at the exposed walls where my books had been. “Easy to think that, if you haven’t been stuck in here for years.”
“Pssh. Shut in a room with you? If this is a prison, it’s fine with me.” He nudged my hand with his head, and immediately a low, warm rumble came from his throat.
“Are you purring?”
“No,” he mumbled, and purred louder. After a moment his eyes slid shut.
I sighed. “Lucky Sangris,” I said, still listening at the door for my father’s footfalls. “Must be nice to be so easygoing. Nothing ever matters to you, does it?”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” he said, eyes still shut.
CHAPTER TWELVE
In Which I Walk Through My Childhood
Everything changed after that.
In the dimly lit back of the classroom, Anju said to me, “What’s going on with you?”
“What do you mean?” I doodled intently in my notebook. “Here, look at this.” I shoved the sketch over the table to her. “Is it any good?”
I had covered the page entirely with straight lines, but in such a way that, through the bars of ink, you could make out the impression of our teacher’s face. Bald head, curved nose, a toothbrush mustache. It was, I thought, a pretty good resemblance. I had captured his half-wild expression as he ranted about moving vectors.
She glanced at it. “Very artistic,” she said, in her rounded, monotonous voice. No matter what she was talking about, that voice of hers made it sound as if she were reciting quadratic equations. “But what’s going on with you?”
I rocked back in my flimsy orange plastic chair. On two legs, and then only one, tilting as far as I could without falling. “What do you mean? Am I acting weird?”
“Yes.”
“You know me. That’s normal.”
“A different weird,” she insisted. “You’re acting almost . . . happy.” She said the word with distrust.
“Sorry.”
But I couldn’t help it. In those days, I don’t know which I valued more: Sangris, or his wings. Walking through my school in the tiny oasis, I’d come across a thousand different memories of places I’d been with him—a piece of juice-sodden fruit tasting like the jungle, sunlight splashing my classroom walls brilliant cloud white, the air suddenly smelling of Spain. And I’d want, instantly, nothing more than to fly again.
Even my father was struck by my new mood. One day at dinner he laid down his fork and gave me a long look over the table. “You haven’t been pestering me to return your books,” he observed.
And he was right, I realized, surprised. I had almost forgotten about them.
“I didn’t want to annoy you,” I said simply.
A pause. “Well . . .” he said. He didn’t look pleased, but there was something on his face: hope. Like somebody working on something massively important, who doesn’t dare to believe it when the pieces seem to be coming together. “Maybe you’re improving.”
My lungs expanded. He had no clue. He hadn’t seen the inside of my head. He didn’t know me well enough; his thoughts were full of a mythical Frenenqer Paje.
That night I held my breath until my father had gone to sleep. Then I dressed with a quick-beating heart, and stood on the cold marble floor of my bedroom, pushing the window up.
Furtively, I climbed out onto the sill. Under my hands the stone felt coarse and crumbly, as though it might give way beneath me at any moment.
I sat inside the square of that window as if I were a painted girl in a picture frame, trapped and unreal and static, and I looked at the black forever waiting just outside. In the silence I could hear the faraway sands giving off a high-pitched seething noise like a steaming kettle. I kept thinking of what my father would say if he saw me now. Then a movement in the darkness, and a gleam of eyes, and Sangris said, “Ah, waiting for me, are you?”
“No, I’m waiting for some other maniac with wings.”
Then I got to my feet, and, taking my arms, he drew me out of my picture frame, into the darkness and the heat, to a place where the ground was frighteningly, thrillingly far away, and the sunless sky was burning and trembling all around us. The stars were faint tinsel, and the air, smooth—not the dry sawdust stuff I had to breathe in the oasis, but sweet and full. Far, far beneath us were the manic lines of streetlights. They jagged over the oasis like stray fantasies. My prison was beautiful from the outside. And then, with one easy glance, Sangris gave me the earth.
“Name a country,” he said. Like a conjuror. Pick a card, any card.
“Thailand,” I suggested, naming my birthplace this time.
My family had lived there a few times too, but I’d already forgotten so much about the sounds of rattling tuk-tuks, the smells of moist earth. It was a bright humid night in Chiang Mai. Sangris and I trotted toward the night bazaar, stepping over the basketfuls of fried red chili that the sellers had spread out on the streets like open bowls of flowers.
Finding a canal on the fringes of the market, we fed enormous gold carp. They curled through the water like submerged flames beneath the heavy tropical-black sky. Acting innocent, I bought him orange juice and watched his face change when he realized that the sellers had filled it with salt. A trick to prevent dehydration, I explained, and ran off cackling before he could get revenge. I wanted to go into the orchid farms and the butterfly gardens, but they were closed, and I refused his offer to break in (of course Sangris had a way of assuming that rules didn’t apply to him, but, I said, they applied to me), so we walked along a half-lit street instead, warm greenness and humming insects all around us, and spent hours trying to catch the guppies that swarmed in innumerable pots by the roadsides. I was better at it: I could lift my
hands out of the green-tinted, plant-filled water slowly, without startling the fish, and show him the flashes of yellow and orange and violet and red guppies that flickered through the water cupped in my palms like a strange and magical treasure.
We were in the same neighborhood as one of my old houses. Sitting on the curb and resting my cheek on the cool rim of the guppy bowl, I looked around at the buildings. Some were Western style, but many, like the one I’d lived in, were small curly-roofed boxes on stilts. It was too dark to see much except their black outlines, and the lights glimmering through slots in the wooden panels that served as windows.
“The last time I lived here was for six months,” I said. “That was pretty long for me, when I was little.”
“How old were you?” said Sangris, still peering sorrowfully down at the elusive guppies in the water. He’d failed to catch even one.
“Eight. A couple of years before moving to the oasis.” As I spoke, the neighborhood seemed to become more solid. I grew uneasy listening to the murmur of human voices in the houses. It had just occurred to me that I might know some of these people, that I was really here. It seemed to me that if I peered through the chinks in the wooden shutters I would see myself curled up inside, barefooted, loud-voiced, smelling of bug spray.
“My dad had a work contract in Saudi. That wasn’t a good place for Mom and me, so the two of us stayed here in Chiang Mai, to be near her family. It was wonderful . . .”
Mom, busy running the house and squabbling happily with relatives, had left me to my own devices. I was eight years old. My father wasn’t around. So I talked myself into only remembering the best things about him, boasting about his travels to my friends, claiming that he owned a camel (a lie, but I liked believing it). I even called him Daddy. Then, at the end of six months, he came back.
I remembered—I’d been incredibly excited for days, unable to sleep. The night he returned, I was awed by him in the airport. His face had become unfamiliar to me; he looked so different from the version I’d developed of him, so remote and stern. I didn’t make a peep, just huddled big-eyed in the back of the car while he took over the driver’s seat and Mom moved to the side. But I wasn’t fazed. I still believed. I was only waiting for him to unbend when he got home, to give me presents like Mom’s relatives always did.
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