What Our Lady said was: “You do not exist.”
And she didn’t.
My mother simply wasn’t there anymore. Her workplace had not heard of her. My father was not married and never had been. Her things no longer cluttered the house. Even her smell winked out. I felt her evaporate from my hands. But these days I have to chew memory to think of her at all.
Third: A necessary digression on the weather systems here. There are places in Aerograd where the sun can be reliably seen. Some the size of a golden pin; some blanketing half a district. These are holy ground, tended by a congregation of biodomes, herbaria and hydrofarming. You are unlikely to receive a permit to cast shadow there. Everywhere else, we dwell in cloud. Mist, fog, cirrus, gloam, cumulus. We have a complex nepheline vocabulary. The clouds never clear, but with practice you can find your way surely enough, except in the Capital. Move through the world as through a labyrinth; pick your path between clouds like monstrous, ephemeral whales. When you pass by, the crackle of snow like electricity will raise the hairs on your skin. You will feel awake, as we do. On the verge of something forever.
Because you are foreign and do not know any better, you will not be able to see the subtlety of the cloud cover as locals do. Ugh, you will exclaim, it’s thick as hair out here. What a dreary, grey mess. It is sad for you. Each person has their personal vocabulary of condensation. The Aerograder dialect is malleable and opportunistic. Many times the Ossuary has released an official chart of terms and grammar to be used when discussing the weather. In this small thing and only this, no Aerograder obeys. Clouds are constant, they are personal, they are ours. Should you have an interest in linguistics, you might amass a considerable collection of private cloud-dialects in one trip to the city.
You will be always damp in Aerograd. You will be always half-blind.
////⁄: Today the clouds ooze forward, flowing like suspended oil. Their tops limn with cold bronze; their undersides bruise violet-yellow with unspilt snow. Look—I will share with you my tongue. How intimate, how bare, how pornographic. In cypher is safety. These are Ice Eels Speaking Forbidden Words. I like them but they make me sad. Their feathery fronds reach out to me, chill my hands, even down here.
I had a lover once. We never married; married couples are kept under observation. There is a danger inherent to them. When traveling to other Districts or off-air reconnaissance zones, one half of the two must remain at home. The Ossuary believes this reduces the likelihood of membership in subversive clubs, public assembly, defection, undue attachment and suicides. But those are all suicidal acts, in the end.
My lover’s name was Pyotr Duda. He had a son by another woman. I never found out what happened to her. Pyotr made roast gannet stuffed with plums for me when Melancholy Horseheads rolled in—that was his phrase. I can share it because he is dead now. Horseheads pricked him with energy, made him hopeful. He took the bird out of the oven and said:
“Bya, you’ve lost three buttons on that shirt. Also the radio says Yellow District will have a high concentration of tigers tonight.”
We did. We heard their vast paws slapping the clammy sidewalks. Their wine-bright pelts flashed in the gloom. Sometimes they would stop in front of a house and roar. Someone always let them in.
I know the word for a group of tigers was once a streak. But that isn’t right at all. It’s a concentration of tigers. It can only be that.
In Aerograd, when we mean sin, we say tiger.
Fourth: The following words have been excised from the official dialect and may not be used within city limits. Kindly make a note—our lives must seem strange, but there are reasons for everything in Aerograd.
Land, union, summer, counterinsurgent, before, below, beyond, else, desire, revolution, Rose District.
There are others. But we have forgotten them since their outlaw. Guard your talk—old words spring up like weeds and must be cut down.
////⁄: I have had the feeling for some time that the dialect is changing. I cannot speak about things that happened to me as a child. The words have dropped away or changed completely.
I will give you an example.
When I think of my father, I want to call him by his name, which I know was András Jandza. I want to talk about his collection of extremely antique altimeters, that hung on the wall in green and brass and punctured glass, as though they meant still to give some arcane reading, some sense of yaw and pitch. I want to say my father smoked, and enjoyed blowing the smoke into the clouds outside our window, watching the smoke enter the vapor and push it aside, just for a moment, before the cloud swallowed it up as though it never were. (Clouds That Smoke Back).
But I find I cannot say the word altimeter. I cannot say smoke. I cannot even say my father’s name. In the cypher I can indicate them, spell them intricately, in the diameters of my angstroms. I still know those words, and what they speak of. But I cannot make myself say them. I know that those sad mechanical faces hanging on my father’s wall like game-trophies are called liars now. Smoke is gas. My father should be referred to only as redacted.
Meat is memory. Tiger is sin.
I wrote just before (oh the sweetest and most nearly eradicated of all the exiles!) of tigers. Of concentrations. But only after that night with Pyotr Duda and the roast gannet stuffed with plums did we start calling them tigers. They were something else before. That dark red and black wildness, that sleekness, the teeth. Something else. Not tigers. But the word is gone. Scooped away as cleanly as a mother. Everyone I knew started calling them tigers at the same time. The cafes were suddenly full of feline phrasing. The giraffes, too—oh, we’ve called them giraffes forever. Since before I was born. And they are giraffes as I understand giraffes: black and spindly and tall, four legs, hungry forever. But they were something else, too. Substituted, truth for giraffes.
Someday we’ll call clouds sunlight.
Do you know what the Ossuary calls us? The people of Aerograd. Our Lady says it too, we have heard it in her addresses. They call us Aeromaus. Singular. All our thousands are to them but one small, scurrying mouse in the works of the city. A creature other than them. An annoyance, leaving dirt and disease behind it. And as they say it, it grows toward truth. As they become tigers and giraffes. We huddle close together, a hundred men and women into a single humpbacked shape. You can see them on any street, clusters trailing away like tails. Their dark shapes move like mountains behind the clouds. One day, perhaps, there will be only one of us and one of her.
When they speak, the tigers and the giraffes and the Ossuary and Our Lady, I am almost certain their whole speech is made up of words that mean something other than they are. Even Aerograd. Their tongues are tigers that are not tigers. What is it they are saying that we cannot hear? What did we call the occupation before occupation? What did we call Our Lady?
Fifth: Why do they call it an occupation? Is not the point of an occupation to convert the occupied population into the occupiers’ image? Surely, surely by now we are what we are: Aerograders, Our Lady’s children. Aeromaus, united, Our Lady’s child. We speak her language, we understand ourselves only according to Aerograd, only in how we intersect with this place where we live together along with the tigers and giraffes and propellers and luminous shrimp and clouds and gannets stuffed with plums.
Tradition, maybe. A joke, maybe.
Where we say occupation there is a line through the twenty-five Districts and six levels of Aerograd. On one side of the line stands Our Lady with her beauty and her colors, flanked by her animals, silent, ageless, all those hands, all those mouths. On the other side we sit. No matter how quiet we become, no matter how still, no matter how we change so that the language emerging from us as natural as being born is not our own but hers, but theirs, it cannot be avoided that Our Lady is other than we. She puts out her hands and we disappear into them. She is something unmovable inside us, living there, going about her business in our bones.
We call it an occupation because we are occupied. We are occup
ied because we call it an occupation. We cannot call them countrymen—or at least they would never apply that word to us.
They seem to like the term. Or else it would wither up and fall over the edge of the world with all the rest.
////⁄: I have heard it said that there is no single Our Lady. Pyotr Duda believed them a species, perhaps thousands, but at least hundreds, in number. He thought that we never see the same one twice. Just as any visiting foreigner (foreigners will never visit) cannot see the variegated clouds, cannot call them by their names, so we cannot see the difference between Our Ladies. We are too used to our own faces. The one who speaks in the Ossuary is not the one who unexisted my mother is not the one that whispers on the radio is not the one who opens the year at the University crowned with steel laurels.
We must have come here from somewhere. The clouds today are pure white puffers. I used to call them Ice Cream But All Vanilla. Now I call them High Seas. We must have come here from somewhere because we are not suited to this environment. We do not have wings, the altitude kills one out of every twenty or thirty of us, our eyes have grown accustomed to seeing in the clouds, but we have no special organ to help us along. Aerograd is a city in the sky, and we are not of the sky. But they—or she—cannot be from the same place that made us. Our Lady came from somewhere else. Perhaps Our Lady does not mean God, but is their collective term for the repeated body they use. Perhaps that is how little influence we have ever had on her, compared with how like her we try to become. Either she never dies or she is multiform. Does it matter?
We were an Academy Town. We were assembled. We must have once been other than we are. Not gas but smoke. Not a liar but an altimeter.
I expect the fifth section of this document to be expunged. I veer too far. To encode with any density is to lose the sense of which is the real message and which the hidden. Have I embedded Pyotr in gannet or did I mean all along to hide gannet in Pyotr?
Sixth: Wonderful entertainments await the energetic visitor in Aerograd. The famous Cafe Blond in Black District, where you may try your teeth on crystal sugar-globes filled with captured clouds and a cup of chai from the beautiful biodomes. Nightclubs are accessible with appropriate government passes. Don’t miss the glorious Aerocirque, a circus of proportions unknown in your nations! The giraffes and tigers of Our Lady perform their greatest feats of strength and grace under torchlight bright enough to burn off the clouds for one brief and lovely evening. You have not lived until you have seen the tigers dance. You have not breathed until you have seen the dark giraffes mate in moonlight. Aerocirque brings together the finest physical specimens of the city to create tableaux, somersaults, aerial ballets, bull-leaping. They dance with the tigers in the climactic act, touching them but deftly and lightly, weaving in and out of the magnificent beasts. The company of these young and exceptional folk will be made available afterward to foreign dignitaries and investors, but the tigers do not keep schedules.
////⁄: On my last morning before coming to this place from which I write and write and the writing will go on as long as Our Lady wishes, I went to the market. I purchased marrow bones and a small packet of ham. I took my daily memory and it pained my head. The last rind of fat always fills us with the meat of death. Of some damned fool running at the perfect, impenetrable skin of Our Lady with a tiny pistol. Of how quickly he vanished, like a cloud dispersing as she passed through it. And then there is the flying, the falling, the flying. We see it as if in peripheral vision and say to ourselves: yes, that is how it is.
I saw Our Lady a second time. It was the last time. You must understand that as the daughter of a woman that never existed, I am suspect by definition. I rank in several categories of guilt, automatic guilt, machine guilt. My mother that never was must have planted something in me, something that will eventually, inevitably bloom. I saw her at night, under the streetlamps, in a nowhere part of Yellow District, a greensward hardly bigger than a kitchen. Where she stood the clouds kept back. She had a halo instead, a teardrop of clear air. Our Lady swayed back and forth. You can never tell if her empty opal eyes are open or shut. She moved her hands in such a way that her flesh appeared as a tidal motion, each little hand clenching into a red fist and then letting go, the clench flowing up and down the garlands of fingers. I was caught, staring at her, coming home late from Pyotr’s apartment, walking through the damp that clung to me like skin. I stumbled out of the cloudbank and into her teardrop of light. Behind her rose a great black giraffe, perhaps her soldier, perhaps her keeper. Our Lady and I looked at each other. The fist-wave still curled up and down her hands. The giraffe which was not a giraffe but a substitution, a cypher, bent its long black neck to sniff deeply, to take in my person. Its eyes flickered like filmstrips.
Our Lady held out her hands to me. I had to take them. My heart tried to run out of my mouth and get away, away from this, whatever was happening. Her hundred hands closed over my two. It felt like being buried. Her skin was cold. It glittered in the streetlamp. I felt certain those were my last moments in Aerograd.
But Our Lady said: I can smell your meat.
And she left me there. The clouds closed after her. She passed me by. It was not grace but some other, stonier, thing having nothing at all to do with me, or Pyotr, or my mother, or gannet or Aerograd.
Or perhaps only boredom.
Seventh: Any enterprising industrialist must admit there is hardly a better place to invest and grow than Aerograd. The engineering feat that keeps us afloat year after year, that keeps the great propellers turning in their enclosed, self-sufficient energy cycle with only the growth of the moss to worry about, that miracle is but the lowest level of our glory. We are rich in fertile land, meteorologically unique, and home to vast storehouses of seeds, rare earths, and artifacts of interest. The area of Aerograd is enormous, more than enough to entertain foreign dignitaries and supply them with reasons to stay. Flocks of gannets provide fowl with a marvelous taste. We are able to condense fresh water from cloud vapor—a task charmingly referred to by the locals as milking clouds. No one wants in Aerograd, and we are eager to share our bounty with those who understand our special place in the world. Who value our culture and can behave themselves as honored guests, indulging our little quirks and civic habits.
Aerograd needs no one. But we strongly suspect that you need us.
////⁄: I am my meat. I must eat memory to live. I have tigered against my city. I have watched the gannets die. This is a cypher. I am a cypher. We used to live in the world and now we live in Aerograd. Everything can be substituted for something else. Everything is substituted for something else. It is dark through the window. Fitful, fast-moving clouds rush by—Somewhere to Be That’s Not Here. For a moment, just a moment, suspended in space like a breath, I see the moon flash through. Dim, cloudbound, an indistinct pearl whitening the air around it. But even as I write the word moon I know that is the old word. Not so old that I have lost it completely, like the things that are tigers now, but old enough that I can only indicate with the circumference of my o’s and zeroes that I wish to say moon. The word for it now is weakness.
How the weakness shines tonight. How full and bright my weakness in the dark. I am Aeromaus. I am no one.
Weakness wanes; weakness waxes.
I was not born in Yellow District. Instead, I live until the age of five in Grey District, 1st Level, near enough to the props to hear them whipping the cream of the wind every day of my tiny life. Those who live in Grey District have the unique (or almost unique, presumably all the edge Districts have the same view—Red, Indigo, Turquoise, Viridian) vantage of being so low and so far. We look over the edge of the world. We call it faith. There is nothing down there but water, in every direction, deep and livid and churning. When the clouds are kind, they cover it so we cannot see.
When Our Lady is unhappy, she brings people here, with her hundred hands. If they have subverted her. If they have kept the old ways of saying what a thing is. If they are in her categories of gu
ilt. They fall but they are flying, like the gannets, dwindling down and out of reach, ecstatic white against the dark water, falling forever but not forever. I always wondered why she did it herself. Maybe there is only one of her and only her. Maybe she is millions.
They flash gold in the sudden sun just before they hit the tide. They become clouds. Snowy Seedpods Seeking New Ground.
No one is coming to visit, to read my tourist guide, to guess at the other meaning, the original or corrupted version. No one is coming because there is no one else.
This is a cypher. Nothing on these pages means what it says. It used to say something else. When you have been here a little while, it will mean something else again. But you will not be here. You will not eat the shrimp or stuff a bird with plums. I will never meet you—but then, it is unlikely I will meet anyone again. I am almost at an end and soon my friends will not remember my name, only redacted or sunflower or whatever substitutes for me.
I am finished.
In my mind I know the name of an ocean the size of everything that was. My mouth can only call it death.
Red Engines
When I kissed her
she tasted like Mars.
Like red cupolas, gilt-spangled,
etched steel cockerels snapping
at a dry, weedy dawn.
She tasted like new streets,
rolled out like silk rugs across meridians,
like a girl
who might not remember what Earth looked like,
even a little,
The Bread We Eat in Dreams Page 20
