Wonders of the Invisible World

by Patricia A. Mckillip

  “My parents are over at the motel,” Maris said glibly, “watching TV.”

  “Oh.”

  “I got hungry.”

  “Oh.” She shifted weight, her expression unchanging. “Good thing you brought your backpack with you, to keep it safe. Never know about parents.”

  “It has my secrets in it,” Maris explained. “I’m going to learn magic.” That, she learned early, always made people fidget, forget to ask questions, find something interesting in the stuffed deer head, or the clock across the room. Another thing was her face, which made them uncomfortable, especially when she painted stars over the chronic mega-zits that built up like cinder cones over a smoldering beneath the surface. Her eyes were too close together, and a watery gray; her nose had grown a roller-coaster bump in the middle of it; her long hair, once white-blonde, had changed the past year or so into a murky, indeterminate shade between ash and mud. She had taken to dressing out of thrift shops to distract attention from her hopeless face: worn velvets, big hats with fake pearl necklaces looped along the brim, sequined tops that made her glitter like tinfoil on a bright day, long, tattered skirts of rich, warm colors that made her look mysterious, a gypsy, a fortune-teller, a woman who knew secrets she might part with for the right gift. Her mother said she looked like an explosion at a Halloween party. “People like you for yourself,” her mother said. “Not what you look like. I mean—You know what I mean. Anyway. I love you.”

  The waitress seemed unfazed by magic; the word glanced off her benign expression without a ripple, as if it were something kids did, like dyeing their hair green, and then grew out of. “Well,” she said. “I guess they’ll know where to find you when they miss you.”

  “Nobody knows where to find me,” Maris wrote a day or three days or a year later, her back against a cement wall, as if she had been driven there by the overwhelming noise of the city. Her fingers holding the pen were cold; she had been cold since she got to the city, though people slept outside without blankets, and the thin light passed through a windless shimmering of heat and dust. It made writing difficult, but at least the fear stayed in her fingers; so far it hadn’t gone to her head. She paused to stare at a group of people on the other side of the street. They had just come out of a club; they wore black leather, black beads, black feathers in their long, pale, rippling hair. Their sunshades were tinted silver; they stared back at Maris out of insect eyes, and then began to laugh. She pushed back against the wall, as if she could make herself invisible. “Oak Hill has no oaks. Oak Hill has no trees. The truck driver said he knew where I should go, and he stopped in the middle of all this and said this is it. This is what? I asked. He said, This is the end of the line. I got out and he kept going. If this is the end of the line, then why did he keep going? You don’t understand, I said. I am going to Bordertown to learn magic. This isn’t Bordertown. This isn’t where I want to go. And he said, Take a look at that. All I saw were some white-haired kids on fancy bikes. He said, Keep out of their way, and find a place to stay with your own kind; that’s all I can tell you. Then I got out and he kept going.” She paused again, watched a pair of bikers shouting at one another, both with one thigh-high leather boot dropped for balance in four inches of water pooling over a clogged drain, as they argued about who had splashed who. She returned her attention to her book. “This is not at all what I expected the unexpected to be like.”

  A shadow fell over her. She looked up into the most beautiful face she had ever seen.

  Later, when she had time to think again, she wondered which she had seen first: the beauty that transfixed her and changed the way she thought about the word, so that it stretched itself, in an instant, to embrace even the noisy, unfeeling, vain and swaggering opposite sex; or, as her eyes rose instinctively to see her own reflection in his expression, the terrifying malevolence in his eyes.

  She jumped, a faint squeak escaping her; she felt her shoulder blades hit the wall. “You,” he said explosively.

  She made another strangled noise.

  “Get out of here. Find your own kind. If you have one. There must be some place for small, white mice to scutter together in this town. You are taking up space in my eyes that I require for other purposes, such as reading the graffiti on the wall behind you.”

  She stared at him, stunned by hatred, as if he had walked across the chaotic street just to slap her for existing. She recognized him then, by his thigh-high boots: one of the bikers who had been arguing in the puddle. His satin shirt, the same silvery-gray as his eyes, had a tide-line of water and dirt on the front. She wondered if he had eaten the other biker, or just froze him to death with his eyes.

  She caught her breath suddenly, dizzily. I am here, she thought. This is the place. “You,” she said, scarcely hearing herself. “You are not human.”

  He spat, just missing her shoe. “Why am I still seeing you?” he wondered.

  “I came here because of you.”

  He was seeing her then, where before he had seen only what he was not. His eyes narrowed dangerously. “You are not worth the chase, ugly little mouse,” he said softly. “You are not worth breath. But I will give you ten. Five breaths of terror, and five of flight, before I summon a pack of ferrets to catch the mouse. They like to play with mice, and there are very few places here to hide. One.”

  “I came here to learn magic.”

  He blinked, perhaps hoping she would disappear. “Two.”

  “I have a book to write the spells in.” She showed him. “And a pen.” She was babbling, she knew, wasting breath, but if he was all the magic she met in Bordertown, then he was all she had. “I’m not running away from anything, or anyone, and you’re right, I am ugly, but that’s not why I want to learn—”

  “Three.”

  “So since you can’t stand the sight of me, maybe there’s someone you know who is blind, maybe, or doesn’t care—And it’s not even for me,” she added desperately.

  “Four.”

  “I mean, it’s not so I can turn myself beautiful or something, at least I don’t think it is, it’s just that—”

  “Five.”

  “It’s what I want. How can I say what I want when I don’t even know what magic is? The word for it is all I know, and you know all the rest. Teach me.”

  He was so still she didn’t hear him breathe. Then he said very softly, “Run.”

  For a moment, they both wondered if she would. Then she heard the word itself, clear and simple, as if he had handed her a pebble. He had given her five more breaths; he had given her more than that; maybe the danger was not from him. Maybe he was teaching her the first step: How to listen. Or maybe, she thought as she hugged book and backpack to herself and scrambled to her feet, it was a word of advice, something to do with the sudden roar of bikes around the corner. She whirled, then turned back to look at him. “Thank you,” she said, and saw his look of utter astonishment. Then she ran down the street, smelling the clogged drain, oil spills, exhaust, hearing laughter around her, burning like the hazy light. Dragons bellowed at her heels, followed her around corners, down alleys where rats and startled cats scurried for safety. She risked a single glance backward, out of curiosity, and found more of him, though younger, lithe and feral, their wild hair white as dandelion seed, their faces, like his, doors that opened and slammed at once, so that she could only glimpse something they would never let her enter. Their hatred was unambiguous and relentless. They would not let her go; they followed her through crowds and up steps, into abandoned buildings and out again, whooping and calling, barking like dogs, crying a name now and then, until they finally tired of playing, and on a busy street, where pedestrians, laughing and cursing, leaped out of their way, one shot forward among the crush to ride beside her.

  He caught her arm; sobbing, her hair catching in her eyes, she tried to pull away. “Get on!” the biker hissed, and Maris, stumbling over her hem, tried desperately to see. The voice was a woman’s. “Hurry!”

  She had lost her backp
ack in some alley; but she still clutched her book and pen; even now, trying to hoist herself onto a moving bike, she refused to drop them. The bike picked up speed; hair flicking into Maris’s eyes and mouth was dark. She spat it out, tightening her hold, the book and pen crammed between them. It was a long time before the voices of dragons behind them became the beat of her heart.

  Later, under the light of a single bare bulb hanging down from a scruffy ceiling, she wrote, “Dear Book, I don’t know where I am.” She paused, hugging herself, staring down at the book. Her skirt was ripped, her feet blistered and bleeding from running in vintage patent leather shoes; her hair and face were grubby, her hands skinned from where she had slipped on garbage in an alley and skidded on cobblestones. She picked up the pen again, though it hurt to write. “You are all I have left of the other world. I lost everything else. This house is swarming with people. Most of them are my age. They came for so many reasons. Some of them are too scared of what they ran from to talk. Some of them are too angry. The house was an apartment building once, I think. There are stairs running everywhere. But a lot of the walls were torn down. Or maybe they just fell down. You can see plumbing pipes, and water stains all over. They gave me something to eat, and told me never, never go into that part of town again. But how can I not? I asked them where to go to learn magic. They just laughed. He didn’t laugh. Trueblood. That’s what they said he was. Elf. Beautiful and dangerous to humans. But he has something I want.”

  She paused again, glimpsing his face among the scattered, terrifying memories of the afternoon. Had he warned her about the bikers? Or had he called them? She wrote again, slowly, “I’ll have to disguise myself somehow to go back there. They know my face.”

  The mysterious comings and goings in the house, she learned as days passed, had simple explanations; there was some order to the constant movement, the replacement of faces. Many of the kids had jobs; they played in bands, or made things to sell, like jewelry, or dyed clothes, out of what they found thrown out in the streets, or in cardboard boxes at thrift shops. Things filtered down to them from places that gave Maris a glimpse of a world beyond the bleak, crumbling buildings. Some—odd, bright feathers, dried leaves—hinted of the wood that Maris had guessed must be only a ghost, a memory of oak among the streets. Other things spoke of wealth: rich fabrics, tarnished rings, beads and buttons tossed casually away that bore elaborate carvings, or strange, woven designs, or even faces, sometimes, that seemed not quite human. “Where did you get this?” she asked constantly. “Where did this come from? What is this?” The answers were always vague, unsatisfying, and accompanied by the baffled expression that Maris seemed to inspire in people.

  “Nobody understands why you’re here,” a girl who made colorful shirts out of scraps told her one day.

  “I came to learn magic,” Maris said; it seemed simple enough, and she had said it a hundred times.

  “Why? Because of something that happened to you? Because of someone?” Maris gazed at her, baffled herself, then thought she understood.

  “You mean because of the way I look? Because I’m ugly? Things happened to me because of that, and that’s why I ran away to learn magic?”

  “You’re not—” the girl stopped, and started again. “No one that just comes here for—” She stopped again. “I mean—”

  Maris scratched her head, wondered absently if she had fleas. “Maybe,” she suggested, “I could understand what you mean if you tell me why you’re here.”

  The girl’s face, whose beauty she seemed always trying to deny, slammed shut like a door, the way the elven faces had, against Maris. Then, as she studied Maris’s face, with its churning skin and angelfish eyes, Maris saw her open again, slowly, to show Maris things she kept hidden behind her eyes: fear, loathing, hope.

  “You’re not afraid,” she said abruptly. “You’re not afraid of—what you left behind. That’s what makes you different.”

  Maris peered at her, between strands of untidy hair. “Maybe you could explain,” she said tentatively. “Maybe you could tell me your name.”

  They sat for a long time on the bare mattress where Elaine sewed swatches of gaudy fabric into a sleeve while she talked. At supper, an endless parade wandered at will through the kitchen, most of it standing up to eat before parts broke off and disappeared, to be replaced by others, rattling crockery, sucking in stew, grunting to one another while they chewed. Maris, who helped cook, took a closer look at the faces around her. For days, they had seemed indistinguishable, all pale and thin, secretive, giving her strangers’ stares if they looked at her at all. Few of them knew her name, though someone had given her a nickname. She had been called a lot of things, most of them having to do with fast food, or small, burrowing animals. But this one surprised her. Teacher, they called her, because she was always asking unanswerable questions. Teach.

  Tonight she separated their faces, picked out things from their expressions, their eyes, put words to them: furtive, belligerent, sick, angry, scared. All of them were scared, she realized slowly. Even the ones who ignited at a skewed look, a word pitched wrong. They hit with their eyes, their fists, their voices. Nothing could come close to them; they were scared the worst.

  “Dear Book,” she wrote after supper. “I could not believe the things Elaine told me. She showed me her scars. She said I could not, no, there was no way, but I finally persuaded her: she is going to dye my hair with her cloth dyes, which she says are made of natural things, like nuts and berries. She knows someone who knows someone who finds those things and makes the dyes. She said she’d think about my face, which is easy to forget, but hard not to recognize, especially with all the living constellations on it. She told me not to talk about myself like that. Why shouldn’t I? Everyone else does. Besides, that way I get to laugh first. She didn’t understand that. Anyway, she knows someone else who makes masks out of feathers and painted cloth, but so far she’s balking over that. She thinks it’s too dangerous. But so is magic. I didn’t know that before, but I know it now.”

  She woke in the dark, that night, hearing strange music. The house was pitch-black, as if the power had gone out again; a single streetlight, as yet unbroken, gave her an obscure perspective of shadowy stairs and corners as she moved through the house. The music drew her down, down, like a child’s hand, innocent and coaxing, saying: Come look at this flower, come look at this pebble, this nut. She followed it without thinking, barefoot, her eyes barely open, trailing the torn lace of an old, sleeveless flapper’s dress she wore to bed. Before she had gotten up, the moment she had heard the music, she had reached for her book and pen; she carried them without realizing it, without wondering what she would do with them on an empty city street in the middle of the night.

  The door squealed when she opened it, but no one in the house called out. The gritty sidewalk was still warm. She saw no one playing anywhere; the music might have come from someone piping on the moon. She yawned, trying to open her eyes, see more clearly. It comes from the streets, she thought, entranced. All the water pipes and cables underground are playing themselves. The electricity is singing. She felt the vibrations through her feet, heard the music find its way into her blood. Then she heard herself humming random, unpredictable notes, like the patter of light rain. The city flowed away from her eyes in a sea-wave, a cluttered gray tumble of buildings and streets, with lamp lights spinning like starfish among them. It paused, and rolled toward her again, green this time and golden-brown, smelling not of stone but of earth.

  She stood on the oak hill, surrounded by a vast wood. The trees were huge, old, towering over her, even while she saw through them into the distances they claimed. I am queen of the hill, she thought dreamily. Where is my face? She bent, still humming, and began to gather fallen leaves.

  She found the oak leaves, the next morning, inside the pages of her book.

  She shook them out slowly, staring. Around her she heard the heavy thump of feet finding the floor, a tea kettle shrieking in the kitchen, s
omebody running up a scale on an electric guitar, somebody else yelling in protest. She shifted a leaf, fitted one over another, another against them. Her skin prickled suddenly. She picked up the pen, wrote unsteadily on a blank page: “Thank you.”

  She borrowed thread from Elaine, to patch a skirt, she said, and spent the morning sewing leaves into a crude mask. The eye holes were tricky; they kept slipping away, no matter how much thread she used. Finally she threatened them with scissors if they did not let her see, and leaves opened under her needle to let the city in.

  She tore a ribbon from her skirt to tie it with, and slid it back into her book. Elaine, sewing with feverish concentration on her mattress, scarcely looked up from her own work as Maris dropped the thread beside her. She grunted, and pushed a jar with her dirty, delicate bare foot towards Maris. “That dye I promised you.”

  “What color?”

  Elaine shrugged. “Something. I’m not sure. It’ll find its color from your hair.”

  It found no color at all, apparently, Maris saw when her hair dried. I look like I’ve been frightened to death, she thought, trying to flatten a silvery crackling cloud of spider web. All the mirrors in the house were cracked, warped, distressed. Like all the faces in them, she thought, wandering from one to another, trying to get a clearer image of herself. She gave up finally, and borrowed clothes to go outside: a pair of torn jeans, a black T-shirt that said, “Yosemite National Park. Feed the wildlife in you.” She went barefoot in case she had to run.

  She was lost before she turned three corners. The ominous, sagging buildings all looked alike; strangers jostled her without seeing her. The city stank like an unwashed, unfed animal; it wailed and growled incessantly. There seemed no magic anywhere, nor any possibility of magic, ever in mortal time. There were no leaves anywhere, only stone and shadow and light too harsh to see through. Maris opened her book, found the mask quickly. She tied it on and breathed again. In disguise, she thought, you can be anyone. Anything. Then, chilled, she remembered what she was carrying.