Borderline

by Mishell Baker

  “Oh man, don’t cry; that’s not fair.”

  “I’m not!” But I was.

  “Fine, you don’t have to tell me.” He started the car, looking irked, as though I had started crying on purpose. Men seem to think that women do this on a regular basis, which is bullshit. Just because you don’t feel something, it doesn’t mean the other person is faking it. You know who thinks like that? Sociopaths.

  I sat in silence for most of the way back, trying to figure out what Berenbaum had meant by his parting words. Maybe it was a reference to working with the Project. Maybe he was referring to the physical healing process. But I had received the comment at a much deeper place.

  I love people randomly and suddenly, and it’s a curse most of the time. When it isn’t, it’s a lifesaver. I wasn’t sure if I wanted to work with Teo, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to live at Residence Four, and I wasn’t sure if I gave a crap about Viscount Rivenholt or expired visas or Arcadia. But I would have walked across the 405 for David Berenbaum right then, and that was enough.

  Teo chose that moment to say, “If something bad happened to Rivenholt, I’ll bet Berenbaum’s behind it.”

  “Don’t be a dick,” I countered. “You have no reason to believe that, other than to be contrary.”

  “Don’t you watch TV? It’s always the husband, or the boyfriend, or the business partner. Someone close. And there’s no one closer to Rivenholt than Berenbaum.”

  “Can you succinctly sum up the nature of their relationship?”

  “As far as we can tell, all artists, inventors, people like that, they have a kind of soul mate in Arcadia. It’s like each has a radio tuned to the frequency of the other one. You can communicate a little without knowing it, across the border, but if you make physical contact, it’s like putting a puzzle together. You get these incredible leaps of genius.”

  “So why would Berenbaum want to harm his own muse?”

  “I dunno. Maybe he’s ready to retire and Rivenholt’s making a thing of it. Berenbaum is the Project’s biggest donor; maybe that ties in somehow. Or maybe it has something to do with Rivenholt fading.”

  “Fading?”

  “When you spend too much time in the wrong world, your body starts to change. The stuff in fey blood that makes them fey—norium, London calls it—it gets replaced with iron and their magic quits working, or humans who spend too long over there get norium in their blood and either go insane or turn into wizards or both. Either way we call it fading.”

  “So what happens when Rivenholt can’t do magic anymore?”

  “It’s already starting,” said Teo. “Did you see Accolade?”

  I didn’t like to admit it, but I knew what he meant. Berenbaum’s recent work was all right, but “all right” was pretty disappointing from Berenbaum. Black Powder was supposed to be an unofficial fourth part of the Cotton trilogy, but people in the business were already doubtful that it was going to be worthy of comparison.

  I shook my head, unconvinced. “Let’s not slap a black hat on Berenbaum until we know for sure that Rivenholt’s not shacking up somewhere with a supermodel or getting a seaweed wrap at Elysienne. Or both.”

  It wasn’t time for dinner yet when we got back to the resi­dence, so Teo excused himself to make some phone calls. At my request he directed me to Song’s room, which was off to the east of the living room, around a corner on the first floor. The door, marked with an A, was partly open, but I knocked anyway.

  “You can come in,” said Song.

  The room had no window, but was well lit and decorated in a homey fashion with undyed fabrics and natural woods. Song had her eyes closed, bending her knees and waving her arms in what I could only assume was some sort of hippie ritual, baby seated comfortably in the wrap that was crisscrossed over her chest. Her serene expression and the freckles across her nose made her look too young to have a child.

  “Abbada,” said the baby when it saw me, and peed. I could tell, because a wet stain appeared at the bottom of the wrap.

  Song, smiling, made a gentle sssssssssss sound at the baby as she opened her small, dark eyes and began to lift it out of the wrap. I said a prayer to whoever was listening that I would never become the kind of person who was happy being peed on.

  “Hi, Millie,” she said as she moved to hold the undiapered baby over a small bowl to catch the last of his dribbles. I could now add the fact that the baby was uncircumcised to the list of things I didn’t need to know.

  “Hey,” I said, trying to unwrinkle my nose. “Is everything okay with Gloria and um . . . the guy with the beard?”

  “Phil?” she said with a smile. “Oh, everything’s fine now. Sorry if you caught their little lovers’ quarrel.”

  “Lovers’—okay. Uh, also, I was wondering, where is the house phone?”

  “There is no house phone,” Song said, dabbing the baby’s doodad dry with a towel and then setting him on the changing pad as she began to unwind her wet wrap. And here I’d thought I would make it an entire day without seeing my landlord’s breasts.

  “No phone?” I echoed stupidly.

  “Once Caryl gives the go-ahead, you’ll get added to our mobile plan. But this house doesn’t have a landline.”

  “Because of the wards?” I still had no idea what “wards” meant, but sometimes you can get people to tell you a lot if you pretend you know most of it already.

  Song just gave me an odd look. “No,” she said. “A landline just makes it harder to keep track of who’s calling who. This way it’s all nice and separate, and if anyone starts abusing phone privileges, it’s easier to deal with.”

  “Phone . . . privileges.” I could feel myself climbing the rungs of anger. “I’ve just spent six months in a psychiatric hospital, and I was really looking forward to being done with that kind of crap.”

  Song smiled gently, tickling her son’s feet as he tried to stuff them in his mouth. “I know it’s hard. But sometimes the Project works with people who are very ill, and it seems cruel to treat them a certain way based on a diagnosis. So Caryl doesn’t tell me the diagnosis. I just start everyone at nothing and then give privileges based on behavior.”

  It sounded fair, to what Dr. Davis would call my Reason Mind, but my Emotion Mind was digging my nails into my palms. Borderlines are not good at patiently earning things; we tend to take any “no” as a personal insult and feel driven to turn it into a “yes” on the spot.

  “Was there someone you needed to call?” she asked me.

  I thought of Dr. Davis—I was allowed to use her for phone coaching any day other than Sunday—but I shook my head. “Not really.”

  Song’s baby made a weird face, and she quickly held him over the bowl again as he ejected an alarming quantity of yellowish-­brown goo from his bowels. This was clearly my punish­ment for staying to argue about the phone.

  “Do you need anything else for your room?” Song asked.

  I considered asking for a bowl to poop in, but restrained myself. “I’m all right for now,” I said, already backing out of the room, “but phone coaching is part of my therapy. If you could at least let Caryl know next time you talk to her, I’d appreciate it.”

  Out in the living room, Gloria’s alleged lover was sitting at the grand piano. Not playing, just sitting, staring at the keys. I pretended not to see him and hurried up the stairs toward Teo’s room.

  When I knocked, I heard Teo saying, “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” to somebody as he approached the door. He opened it and stepped away to allow me inside without even looking at me. From downstairs I heard the gentle opening chords of something familiar—Chopin?

  The one-eared cat was perched alertly on Teo’s loft bed, watching him pace. I noticed Rivenholt’s drawing on Teo’s desk and eyed the cat warily as I picked up the paper. It was still a spare, skillful piece of work, but this time it didn’t give me the same rush of feeling.


  “The magic’s gone from the drawing,” I told Teo once he had hung up and stuffed his phone back in his pocket. Even that slight weight seemed to endanger his jeans’ purchase on his skinny hips.

  “Nuh-uh,” he said. “Charms last for months, years even.” He snatched the paper from me and stared at it. “Huh. I guess he really sucks at it.” Carelessly he set it back on the desk.

  “Isn’t that a clue or something?”

  “Why would a faded charm be a clue?”

  “Well I don’t know. It could mean he died or something.”

  “That’s not how charms work,” Teo said. “They’re like paintings. They don’t care about the painter once he walks away, they just . . . are. Until they’re not. Anyway, Regazo de Lujo put me through to a room when I asked for Forrest Cloven, which was Rivenholt’s first alias with us. I hung up as soon as they transferred; I’d rather he not know we’re coming.”

  “Nice work,” I said. I meant it, but it came out sarcastic somehow.

  The cat made a sound like a rusty door hinge, and Teo grabbed him to set him down on the desk. “We’ll have to get Caryl’s approval to go up there,” he said as he scratched behind the cat’s missing ear. “She’s not answering right now, but I’ll keep trying.”

  “Where is this place?”

  “Santa Barbara, just inside the Project’s perimeter. Couple hours’ drive.”

  Fantastic. A four-hour round trip in the tobacco-mobile with Mr. Grouchy.

  “What’s the deal with the cat?” I asked. “Caryl told me not to touch him, but he seems nice enough.”

  “Monty belonged to our last boss, and that . . . bugs Caryl. Long story. But he likes me. He’s attracted to angst.”

  I guess I was angsty enough for Monty too, because he let me run a hand down his back. His fur was softer than it looked, but I could feel his ribs under it.

  Downstairs, I heard a cascade of spiraling eighth notes from the piano. I thought of my father for a moment, his straight back at the baby grand in our foyer. The pain wasn’t as fresh as it ought to have been; we’d been distant for years before his suicide.

  “You know,” I said, “since we have time to kill anyway while you keep trying Caryl, why don’t we look into why Rivenholt ran off? If we know what made him run, we might have better luck getting him to come back.”

  Teo looked annoyed, but he did seem to think it over. “We could snoop around some of his hangouts, see if anyone heard anything. Maybe the Seelie bar.”

  “The what now?”

  “Oh. Um, so to go along with the fairy theme, London HQ calls the rival fey kingdoms the Seelie and Unseelie Courts. It breaks down to ‘pretty’ versus ‘scary.’ Mostly it’s the pretty Seelie that come to this part of the country looking for their Echoes, and they have their own little watering hole out in West Hollywood.”

  I opened my mouth.

  “Don’t even think of making a fairy joke; it wasn’t funny the first dozen times somebody said it.”

  “I wouldn’t dream of it, boss.”

  11

  There’s a saying that somebody tilted this country on its end, and everything that wasn’t securely attached fell into California. I think it’s the main reason I feel at home here. But when Teo and I started hoofing it through the very gayest part of West Hollywood late that afternoon, I discovered that even in Los Angeles it is possible to feel like a freak.

  I think some of the more hostile stares were rooted in jealousy. Teo was a nice piece of ass, and the fading light suited him, making him look brooding and mysterious.

  “Are you gay?” I asked him.

  “I dunno,” he said.

  “What do you mean, you don’t know? Do you like guys or not?”

  “Shut up a second,” said Teo, slipping on his mirror shades. He looked ridiculous; there was barely a blush of sunset left in the western sky. “There it is.” He stopped at an intersection and pointed across the street.

  “The sushi place next to the bookstore?” I blinked. What was a Christian bookstore doing half a block from a drag show anyway? The thought had barely entered my head before it fluttered away and I found myself looking at the sushi place again. I don’t even like sushi. I looked back at the bookstore, only to find my attention wandering across the street to a coffee shop.

  “Look at my glasses.”

  I turned and looked at him. “Very nineties, Neo.”

  “Not what I meant.”

  “You want me to look through them?”

  “No, look at them. Look at what they’re reflecting.”

  Teo leaned down a bit. I reached to turn his face to the proper angle, and when I saw what he was talking about, I got goose bumps. I could just barely make out the reflection of what was really next to the sushi place: a pink stucco building with a neon martini glass in one window and a winged neon female in the other.

  “Holy shit,” I said, looking back and forth from the glasses to the street over and over. Seeing isn’t always a straight shot to believing.

  I yanked the glasses off Teo’s face and put them on, looking back across the street. Now I could still see the fake bookstore, but it was covered in shadowy mesh and snaky gold figures that reminded me of Arabic writing.

  “Why don’t they make it so that the glasses look through the illusion when you’re wearing them?” I said.

  Teo wrapped an arm around me, pulling me close and ­nuzzling my ear. What the hell?

  “Cállate,” he murmured as people gathered behind us waiting for the WALK sign. “Look, if I’m wearing these and don’t even know that bar is supposed to be hidden, I might say something to give it away.”

  “And this is all a big secret.” I slipped an arm around him too, because why not?

  “There’s a Code of Silence written into the Accord,” he whispered, his breath giving me goose bumps. “The Accord’s like a treaty; it keeps the Unseelie from invading and fucking up the planet for kicks.” Then he nabbed the shades off my face the way I’d done to him and pulled away, slipping them back on.

  I adjusted the valve on my prosthetic knee so I could move at a better speed for street crossing. When the light changed, Teo grabbed my hand and pulled me toward the hidden bar. I trundled awkwardly along, cane thumping in the street.

  “Your hair smells girly,” I said.

  “Your opinion means so much to me.”

  The closer we got to the bookstore, the less worthy it seemed of my attention. It gave off a faint odor suggesting moths and mildew. As Teo stepped toward the doorway, I grabbed his arm.

  “Wait,” I said. “We need to double back; I dropped my—” I stopped. I hadn’t brought anything besides my clothes and my cane, and the latter was still clutched firmly in my hand.

  Teo just grinned at me. “It’s so cute watching the noobs get glamoured.”

  “That’s creepy,” I said, staring at the bookstore. “I mean, it’s creepy because it doesn’t even feel like magic.”

  “Uh-huh. Keep moving.”

  “Sorry,” I said, and obliged him.

  “Millie.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re moving away from the bookstore.”

  “Damn it!” This time I let Teo take my arm and escort me. Stupid fairies.

  The moment we passed through the doorway, the spell dropped like a sheet from a birdcage, and the world burst into song.

  Not just song, but deep, pulsing rhythm and color, so much color. Fuchsia and lime and orange and forest green and robin’s-egg blue, splashes and streaks and spatters and stars. There was no rhyme or reason to it; the colors seemed to have blossomed spontaneously from the walls. I don’t know why it was beautiful, but it was. Unlike most nightclubs, it was as bright as a movie set. Great feathered ceiling fans rotated slowly, sending iridescent bubbles drifting through the space.

  Th
e little venue wasn’t highly populated, but everyone in it looked as though they’d just stepped off a fashion shoot.

  “Wow,” I said. “Who are these guys?”

  “Sidhe. Nobility of the Seelie Court, like Rivenholt. If you think they look good now, check the reflection in the glasses.” He took them off and handed them to me.

  I tilted the shades toward the woman behind the bar. Even distorted by the shape of the lens, what I saw in the reflection made my one good knee turn to Jell-O. Huge, luminous laven­der eyes, hair gleaming and writhing as though in its own private wind. Her skin shimmered like liquid opal.

  I handed the glasses back to Teo. When looked at directly, the bartender was just an ordinary supermodel: strawberry blond and lightly tanned, with glitter-dusted eyes and a rack to die for.

  “Baroness Foxfeather,” said Teo as he approached her. She flashed him a smile, then looked at me. Her expression changed immediately to an equally bewitching pout.

  “What is that,” she said, pointing at me, “and why did you bring it in here?”

  Teo stopped short, looking as surprised as I felt. “This is my new partner,” he said. “Millie.”

  “Lisa is still dead?” the fey said sadly.

  “Yes.”

  She stabbed a manicured finger at me. “It’s half metal.”

  “I’m just a regular person,” I reassured her awkwardly. “I got hurt really badly, and they had to, uh, repair me with metal bits.”

  “Like, surgery?” said Foxfeather, her suspicion turning to fascination as quickly as the lamp over the bar shifted from pink to periwinkle.

  “Yeah,” I said, nodding like a bobblehead doll. “Lots and lots of surgery. Well, the legs weren’t surgically attached; they can come off. But some of my bones needed to be held together with—”

  “What do you need, Teo?” Foxfeather had already lost interest in me. “Is it another inspection?” She tossed her hair over her shoulder; even the mundane facade was enough to make me rotten with jealousy.

  “No, nothing like that.” Teo didn’t seem in the least distracted by the lightly freckled cleavage on display. Yup, definitely gay. “We were just wondering if you’d seen Viscount Rivenholt recently.”