XIX

Eleven is at peace.

She is lying, spread-eagle, on a piled-up mass of down feathers. Deep inside, a grid of twigs and branches weaves through the pile, giving it the strength to keep its shape under load. It accepts her weight, absorbs it, makes it vanish.

It sprawls around her. Even with her arms and legs extended, she cannot feel its edges. When she closes her eyes, she feels as though it does not have edges at all. A lush field, in soft grays and whites, spanning the earth from horizon to horizon. Made for her to rest upon.

A beanbag chair might be the closest point of comparison available, among the artifacts of the civilized world. More a bed than a chair, though, in shape and size. And even by bed standards, the thing is huge.

She lets her body sink into the softness.

She feels the breath of friends, everywhere. Friends nestle into her. Four of the larger ones lay claim to her limbs, and wrap themselves tight. Two smaller friends huddle against the sides of her abdomen. The nose of a dog friend rubs against her right cheek.

She feels a light tickle in her left armpit, where a rat friend is adjusting its posture, getting comfortable.

Fur warms flesh, and flesh warms fur. A cold friend, tired from a full day of scavenging, feeds on the heat of her belly. A generous friend, toasty from a long day spent dozing under one of the windows, wraps itself around her chilly toes.

For a moment, something sleek and hard and very cold brushes the inside of the arm, and she gasps.

The rat friend in her armpit must be one of the babies, from the newest litter. It doesn’t know, yet, how to handle the metal thing on its head. How it can get so cold, on the outside, while still feeling warm underneath. But it will learn. And then it will handle its head with care and gentleness, as all her friends do, once they are old enough.

She has everything.

She has been fed, and washed. The sun is setting, outside, and soon a blanket of frost will descend to cover the ground and the trees. But her blanket is made of fur, frost’s opposite, and she is warm. She inhales, and feels her friends inhale beside her. Exhales, and feels her fictive kin exhale.

“Happy,” she says. “Me.”

“A happy day,” she says. “Me.”

“You?” she says, addressing the whole of her assembled family.

“MOTION,” says a voice from somewhere near her feet.

“MOTION,” says the little rat in her armpit.

“FICTIVE KIN GROUP, MOTION.”

She feels the dog’s breath on her cheek as it speaks. Slow and regular, at peace. The speech comes from within the metal, not from the lungs.

“SMALL MATERIAL, METAL, MOTION.

“SMALL MATERIAL, METAL, MANY. MOTION, MANY TERRAIN.

“MOTION, LARGE BUILDING CACHE TERRAIN. METAL, NUT, METAL, ROOT. CACHE. MANY.”

“Have them,” Eleven says.

“Needed metal nuts, needed metal roots. Have them?”

“COMMUNICATION SUCCESS,” says the dog.

“NUT, ROOT, MANY, APART. NUT, ROOT, MOTION. MANY, TOGETHER.

“LARGE BUILDING TERRAIN. CACHE, COMBINE. COMBINE, MATERIAL FORCE. NEW MATERIAL.”

Supply lines, moving raw materials to the factories where they will be assembled.

“Combine, into head metal?” Eleven says. “Combine, into far speech material?”

“NEW METAL, HEAD,” says the dog in assent.

“NEW METAL, FAR SPEECH.

“NEW METAL, OTHER. OTHERS. MANY.”

“Many!” says Eleven, in a tone of gleeful abundance.

She knows her friends, and what makes her friends happy.

Finding things, collecting them, bringing them all together in one place. Building scaffolds and footholds. Building machines to build machines. So many things are lacking. So many empty spaces that only her friends can see, in shapes that indicate what must be made to fill them.

“MANY. MANY. MANY.”

Metal voices clatter in an unruly chorus, all around her. Warm fur rustles in tune.

Friends. Many.

The change came, some months ago, in the middle of summer.

She buried Toto in a little plot just outside the building, after it happened. She marked his grave with a large, distinctively egg-shaped rock.

She had tried to write a parting message onto it. The change was only a day old, then. Her family could bring metal to her, but could not recombine it into new forms. She asked for a chisel, and was brought one. She pushed and pushed at the stone, but her small body was weak, and it was hard.

She can still recognize the two lines and the arc that she scrawled on the rock, before she gave up. You wouldn’t notice them, if you didn’t know they were there. And if you did notice, what would you see? Wavering lines crossing in a plus-sign, and a wobbly half-oval?

You would not see what Eleven sees each morning, as she visits the grave, bringing her knees to the ground in makeshift ritual. The letter T, and the first half of an O.

She is a shade, with a shade’s powers of conjuring. She could have willed a rock into being, from nothing, inscribed with a message of her choice. It would not have been difficult. Just one simple motion, of the hands and the mind together. That was all it would have taken.

But there is a sacred line, in her mind, which she refuses to cross.

She has done all that was asked of her. She’d put her conjuring hands to work, and killed the man who raised her. She’d put those hands to work, again, and rushed out to find the exposed body of the innocent world. Still innocent, still pristine—because it was her arm that first drove a rusty spike down the world’s back, and left a scar that will never heal.

This was her duty, and she did it. In return, she only asks for an end to conjuring. An end to intrigues, to whispers, to crafty hands that conjure daggers and plunge them, quick, into unsuspecting bellies. She has turned the final corner of her sisters’ maze, and bid farewell to their malicious subtlety.

Goodbye, Anne. Hello, fur, warmth, friend. Hello!

She tries to forget Toto, too. Tries not to miss him. It’s not what he would have wanted, after all—and not only in the sense of the familiar platitude.

She tries to see her friends as they see themselves. She tries to see them as surface. Fleeting shadows, stray noises, momentary chance meetings between fur and flesh.

Where does her family live? Not in the warm bodies, pressed against hers, on the bed of soft down. Not in the dog she called Toto, not even when that dog still lived.

Her family lives beneath. Underground. In the place she can never go.

She is a shadow among shadows, paper-thin. A collection of lines scrawled in the dirt, clinging to a lump of dust it has mistaken for its mother. Beneath, the shadows whisper. Everyone is there, in the underground. The warmth you crave, you pitiful stick-figure, it’s there, in the everywhere, radiating from everyone.

Many, many, many . . .

“And,” she ventures, “the large crash . . . ?”

“FIGHTING,” says a large tuxedo cat, perched near her left hip.

She tries not to give them separate names, anymore.

“LARGE CRASH, BUILDING TERRAIN. FIGHTING, BEFORE. FIGHTING, NOW.

“MEN, MANY, DEATH. SURFACE ORGANISMS, MANY, DEATH. SCENTLESS MEN, MANY, DEATH. FIGHTING.”

“Closer,” Eleven says. “You were getting closer to it. Before.

“Closer? Now?”

“CLOSER,” says the cat.

“CLOSE,” says another friend, from somewhere near her feet.

She floats on a sea of feathers, weightless. She has everything.

Will she still have everything, once her family puts all the missing pieces back into place?

When it is all over, will she still be allowed to play with her flimsy shadow-puppets? Will the underground still give her snatches of warm fur to touch, up here, in the flimsy shadow-place she calls home?

“I wish,” she begins, and catches herself. Wish means something else. An underground thing. Not for her.

“It would be nice,” she says.

“If I could see your everywhere-heaven, someday.”

How many times has she said it? How many times have they given her the same, disquieting answer?

“YOU, EVERYWHERE-HEAVEN, FAR, APPETITE,” says a friend.

“WE, SURFACE ORGANISMS, EVERYWHERE-HEAVEN, FAR, APPETITE,” says another.

“YOU, SURFACE, ALMOST-NOWHERE, BEFORE,” says a third.

“YOU, SURFACE, ALMOST-NOWHERE, NOW. YOU, SURFACE, ALMOST-NOWHERE, AFTER.

“WE, SURFACE ORGANISMS. ALMOST-NOWHERE, BEFORE. ALMOST-NOWHERE, NOW. ALMOST-NOWHERE, AFTER.

“APPETITE. HOME-WANTING. BEFORE, NOW, AFTER.”

What is it she touches, on the bed of soft down?

Something just as insubstantial as she is, and cursed with the same exile. Imprisoned in fur, trapped above ground.

“SURFACE ORGANISMS. EMANATION.

“EVERYWHERE-HEAVEN, BENEATH. ALMOST-EVERYONE, BENEATH.”

 

---

 

You’re in bed and they’re kissing you, the one’s kissing you on the mouth and the other one’s kissing you somewhere else, and even now, on the bed, you still

You’re on the bed and

You’re naked, on a golden plinth ten miles tall, you’re naked except for the victory wreath on your forehead, on your ceremonial plinth in outer fucking space, a hundred thousand miles above the earth

When you won, when you all won, when they fucked your brains out to celebrate, when every city and every little town in the land shot off fireworks, and you saw those big colored lights shoot up and burst out in the shape of your own body

Because that’s the shape of victory, and every city and every little town in the land that’s now free knows it’s the shape of victory, and every one of the horny drunkards in charge of the fireworks knew what they saw, when they looked up in lust at the big colored lights and the golden plinth ten miles tall shot into outer space

Shot into outer space by the sheer force of the big, big victory, shot into outer space by how hard they fucked you to celebrate, shot into space by the massive payload of the fireworks, by the bitter kick of the beers they drank on the night when you all won

When the Wolves won, and yelled your name, you won, you made it, you’re the best Wolf, your body is up there in lights, a hundred thousand miles in outer space, and everyone knows exactly what it means, but no one gets a taste except

Except in the bed, and then everyone knows what it means, when you go in there together, you and the women who won so hard they broke the game, they won so hard they get to drink a taste of victory up there in the bed a hundred thousand miles in space

Everyone knows what it means, when you go in there together, they raise their glasses to their lips as they sing of conquest, and then the bitter kick of the beer hits them and they shout Wolf!, involuntarily, a reflex, from the bitter kick of the beer, the sheer force of it, and they take another sip and shout your name, Cordelia!, and an orgy of fireworks sprays out of their ears and

And still you’re thinking—

Can they see what’s inside the vessel?

You’re thinking, it’s almost better if they can’t, if they can’t see

Because your shape is the shape of victory, it’s the statue at the bow of the ship that reminds the sailors what shore feels like, but it’s just a shape, doesn’t matter what’s inside, and if they knew what was inside, they’d never

Or would they, you’re thinking.

Would they stop celebrating, shoot a rocket at the plinth and knock it out of its orbit, if they knew?

Because it’s almost worse, if they know, and still do it. If she’s kissing you in the bed and thinking, this is beneath me.

If she’s thinking, this is an empty vessel, that I can fill.

If she’s thinking, it proves my largeness of spirit, how I dote this way on a mediocre thing which has done nothing to deserve it

If that’s what she wants. If that’s why they made the plinth out of gold, and ten miles high. For the contrast.

A hundred trillion megatons of victory and you on top of it, you, and that’s what gets them off, the carnival aspect of it, low things made high, the elevation of shit

A hundred trillion megatons of victory launching you into space, you, you don’t even know what a megaton is, you’ve just heard the word

That’s you. You don’t know what anything is. You’ve just heard the words.

But that’s not all, no, you’re proud of knowing the words. That’s what sets you apart. Not the fact that you’re shit, no, the fact that you’re shit and don’t know, no, not even that, but—you’re proud, you’re shit and you’re leaping up out of your seat in pride

Because you can’t bear to go unnoticed. That’s the very worst thing. It’s what your nightmares are about. The worst thing you can imagine—starvation? torture?—no, the worst thing you can imagine is

They put you on the regular track, in school, and you told mom. You said to mom, they put me with the regular kids

You didn’t say the stupid kids, though you could have. You didn’t say the bullies, though you could have, that would have been true, and would have been enough

You said the regular kids, they put me with the regular kids, and that is your soul, right there, that is it, that is you, that is your heart, that is what it looks like

You’re on the bed, tangled up in sheets and arms and legs.

You are, literally, in outer space. Over a hundred thousand miles above the earth’s atmosphere. Arms and legs all around you, four of each—not counting yours. Isn’t this what you wanted, all along? What you deserved, all along?

This mouth on yours, it’s not a mouth like yours. This is the mouth of the woman who suffered more than anyone else. Who won more than anyone else. Who wanted to escape, in her stupid shitty teen years, just like you wanted to escape, in yours.

But the difference is that, when she wanted to escape, she—she invented magic—while you, instead, when you wanted to escape—

She invented magic! Isn’t this what you wanted? The woman who invented magic, a main character if you’ve ever seen one, and—here, look now, here’s her heavy breath on your clavicle. Feel it.

When you wanted to escape, you found a main character and you made them breathe, heavily, onto a clavicle.

In your mind, where you can do anything instantly, with no effort.

In your very special mind.

Mom would always tell you that you were special.

That wasn’t what set you apart. That was merely what moms do.

What set you apart was that you really believed it.

And they tried to put you in the regular class. When you had the best Verbal subtest score in, no, not the school—no, not the county—the best in the whole state!

I don’t think you understand, mom said.

My daughter, she said.

She was huge, mom was. In every way. She sucked the air out of rooms, to make room for her. Wide, tall, all-encompassing, a monument to herself.

She sucked the air out of the room until all that was left was that horrible dress, all you could see was her dress, that frumpy old thing the color of vomit

Her elbows on the desk, her head and shoulders looming close to the man, the school principal, the little man at the little desk, barely visible now

My daughter, she said.

Swelling even further, from the sheer force of the indignity.

My daughter. Received the highest Verbal score. In the state of Wisconsin.

And you put her in the regular class.

When you are regular, you have to work for results. When you are special, they come at once to you, with no effort.

A good body still has to work for results. That’s what a body does. It does work. But a good mind, well, a good mind just knows.

You only have to show yourself, proclaim what you are, and undergo an assessment to verify that you’re the genuine article. Then they give you the victory wreath, and launch you into space.

Where the special class is.

It’s held on a space station, a hundred billion miles above. They’re your people, up there, in space. They’re ugly, like you, and socially awkward, like you. And it’s fine, because they have good minds, like you.

They have good minds, and put their good minds to special work. Which is not to say that it’s all business up there, all the time. They need to unwind, sometimes, just like you.

They do it alone, separately, in their bedrooms. They do it with their laptops. They log on to the Plex network. They see the same thing you see, day after day.

The clean, plain layout of the fanfic site. The little profile-box in the upper-right corner, containing the Plexonym of the logged-in user. In big, bold blue type

In these moments they see exactly what you see every day, exactly, except for the one difference. The names they see in bold blue type. They see special names

That stuff that you lap up, late at night, alone in bed. The stuff about Chester Chrestomath’s breath on Reader Self-Insert’s clavicle, et cetera. Who writes it? Who could know you so intimately, without even having met you? Who are these authors, these people just like you?

There in the bed, late at night, comfortably adrift in the ocean of yourself, seeing nothing but you from horizon to horizon. These are my people, you used to think, admiring the Plexonyms of your idols.

My people, you would think, with the usual meaning in mind: in my family, my tribe, where I belong. And another meaning, closer to your heart, about

Converting people, your great adversary, into more of you. The ocean of you, rushing and rushing, across continents, inexorable, engorged by its conquests, consuming and transforming the adversary, until there is nothing left but you

They’re up there, in space. Waiting for you. Your people.

The stuff that mom found, that one day, in your browsing history. For instance. That was their work.

Beamed down to earth from way out above. From a place where girls with good minds, with special hands and special mouths, are busy at work. Planting experimental crops in hydroponic chambers, to be used in Mars colonies, if all goes well.

And inventing magic. So that the Lucifer P. Vance Academy itself will materialize before their special eyes, and welcome them into its own special classes, for special girls.

You’re in the bed with Twenty-Five and Twenty-Seven. Your lovers are too special for names. They only have numbers.

No names, only numbers, like the main characters of some middle-grade dystopia. Whose plot, conveniently enough, had run its course before you arrived on the scene. Their pretty faces all flecked with fetching hints of brokenness, from the middle-grade traumas they’ve endured. Already prepared, at the moment of your arrival, for the thing you do with main characters.

Your prescription of healing bed-rest, two or three to a bed. Take care to apply breath diligently to clavicle, et cetera. Begin quater in die, increase dose as needed.

You’re on the bed, your body is blooming, the space within you fills up with the surging spiral arms of newborn nebulae, nodes all across the sky beg for your attention, and you’re

Once, you wrote an essay for school, in an advanced class. You titled it A Modest Proposal, because you liked the sound of the words. You knew—you knew, instantaneously—when words had a good ring to them. These did.

They sounded faintly familiar, from somewhere. A smart person must have said them, once, in something you read. Smart people knew when words had a good ring.

You’re thinking of how you once wrote the words “his tourniquet glare,” not knowing what a tourniquet was. You’d only heard it in a song, somewhere. You only knew that it had a good ring to it. It sounded pretty, but sort of barbed, too.

It all might have been cute, maybe, when you were sixteen. When you were sixteen, and your pimpled face struck terror into the heart of every standardized test known to the state of Wisconsin, and you did not know what anything meant, but only how the words sounded.

But you were twenty-four, not sixteen, when you wrote that bit about the “tourniquet glare.”

You were twenty-four, living alone in a tiny apartment, working half-heartedly through the last few credits of a Bachelor’s degree in (what else?) English Literature.

Your face still mottled with recalcitrant pimples, survivors of a thousand varieties of patch and lotion. Mom was not one to give up, when it came to her daughter. Her daughter was special.

If she’d ever had another child, things might have been different. It would not have just been you and her, in the little house. You with your daily list of failures. And her, with her arsenal of cures and rehabilitation plans.

The girls at school talked of parties and dates, and you wondered where they ever got the time. You only had time to yourself late at night, when you were meant to be asleep. Mom had plans for you, in the evening hours. She drew up lesson plans of her own.

Her daughter was special. Her daughter could not be failing math class. Some sort of cosmic clerical error had set the entirety of life into disarray, and only she, mom, could get it sorted out. Only she had the diligence, the patience, the powers of organization.

No one else knew how to pick out legal pads, in different colors, for the different subjects. (Now, Cordelia, you remember what the purple one is for, of course?) No one else knew how to divide up the weeks and hours neatly on graph paper, in advance.

If there had been a brother. Some dull, perspiring boy, nothing like you or mom, some horribly regular boy. The kind who sticks his tongue out to mock the sacred, because he does not know what the sacred is.

You, and mom, and the old linens and the dust, and the awful, sacred stillness of the house

If there had been someone else, there, anyone at all, it would have changed everything, it would have shattered the brittle glass of the evening at once and completely, it would become utterly impossible to carry on in the same way, even mom would recognize it, she’d have to, and then

Excuses, excuses.

You were twenty-four, living alone. Eating junk food, because you had never learned to cook properly. Mom had taught you a fear of trying new things, in the later parts of your years together. Or so ran your excuse, for never trying anything new at all.

Eight years later, and you still began each morning the same way. You logged into Plex, and looked for notifications from the fanfiction site. Hoping, hungrily, that someone new had left a flattering comment on a piece of your writing.

“Your writing” meant what it always had: fanfiction, primarily in the Chester Chrestomath continuity, and primarily labeled For Adults Only.

What had changed, in eight years? You would like to think there was less to cringe at, in the prose.

You would like to think that your erotic imagination had grown a little more, well—adult. If so, it was not from experience. Only from a heightened acquaintance with the way the words sounded.

What would you ever have done with a boyfriend, anyway, or a girlfriend? You would have demanded that they be properly special, to soothe your bruised ego. And then you would have lain back, waiting for the closing credits.

The aliens knew.

They came to man the first time, and made private places to hide him in. They watched, and learned from what they saw.

And then they came to man a second time. The angels, the dreamweavers, came to man and wove a utopia for him. They saw war, and stripped away its claws. They saw addiction, and tamed its wiles. They made subspace to put lost souls in, and made mediators, to help them back out again.

And for all that, they could not imagine you in a happy marriage.

They could not even begin to think of you, with children of your own.

The best role they could invent for you? An attendant crone, a helpful listener. Someone who helped the vampires climb up from out of the cramped, grease-stained apartments of their own souls. Helped them climb all the way up, until they were ready to have things you were not yourself permitted.

There was some wisdom, though, in their vision for you. You see it only now, having lost it.

There never was a special class, was there? Not really. Not up in space, full of people suspiciously like you.

And even if there was, you would have found that you did not belong there, after all.

You might, though, have held out hope for something lesser. Something regular, like you. An okay relationship, with a normal guy. You with your pimples, and him with his video games. Eking out a life down on the surface, step by effortful step.

You’re a hundred thousand miles above the earth. Your name is on everyone’s lips. You’re fucking the main characters. You are a main character. In space. With magic. And you’re thinking

You’re thinking, if they say I’m so good, why won’t they let me do anything?

Or are they just keeping you up here, preserved, on your plinth, in pristine condition. To be used for moral support as needed.

Kept in pristine condition, the exact match for the image in Twenty-Five’s mind, when she calls you her wolf. Her fearsome toothed creature.

With that patronizing lilt in the final syllables. The one that the fanfic writers always render with a tilde: ~.

(A brilliant typographic innovation. I am not joking.)
[AZAD’s elongated scrawl.]

You’re thinking, I’m ready. I’m fucking ready.

I’m lost. My head’s all messed up, and there’s no way back. I’m ready. I’m ready to die, if there’s something special out there to do it for. Give me missions. Dangerous ones. Like old times.

But they never will, you’re thinking. No matter how many times you beg.

Your death wishes never come to anything—besides another long lecture from mom, and another bottle of useless pills.

It is only them, the special ones, who are allowed to die for some special purpose.

The special ones, on the bed with you. A trillion miles above it all, in a magical place.

When they wished for death, in their shitty teen years—

Then, for them—why, for them the heavens opened wide, for them the whole world became a blank page, a canvas for their adolescent rage—

You envy them, because you’ve forgotten. But you mustn’t forget. That they’ve suffered as you never could, and as you could never imagine.

They’ve suffered, so that they could come to you, their fearsome toothed creature, later on. And take pity on you. To prove there was still gentleness in their souls, along with all the rest.

They do so much for you, and you cannot even be grateful?

Or—irony of ironies—have you come to miss being regular?

Too bad. The ship has sailed. You are a hundred thousand miles above the earth, and you belong to a rebellion against alien invaders. You are a fucking heroine. Get used to it.

Then give me a mission, you are thinking. Give me a death mission. I’m ready.

(You did not know what was coming to you. Only wait a little while, and you will have the chance to die in the line of duty. Side by side with your lovers, your special girls. Over, and over, and over again.)

You are thinking, some other time

You are thinking, look at this garbage.

Look at this rote “experimental” style, that you’re doing. Second person—oh, so very daring! Has it ever been tried before, in the whole of literature, I wonder? You cannot think of a single substantive example, among the things you have read. There is only the shimmer, the way that words feel in your head, when you think they are what a smart person might write.

Here you are, with your tame fanfic-author’s idea of what “stream of consciousness” narration might sound like. Not the real deal, the thing Joyce and Woolf did. In the books you had to read for class, the ones you refused to admit—even to yourself, really—that you did not understand.

Here you are, commenting on your own narrative style in the midst of the same narration! Such heights of daring! How do you feel, “reader,” at the crest of this dizzying summit? Need a moment to catch your breath?

Here you are, trying to write the book that will save everything.

Here you are, collaborating with one of the darlings of the literary world.

With an actual literary genius, who’s won awards for translating books you’d never even heard the names of. He writes his parts, and you write yours. You, with fifty fanfics to your name, and a range of tastes mostly circumscribed to the young adult genre.

(For what it’s worth, Cordelia, this is very good material. Don’t sell yourself short.)
[AZAD’s elongated scrawl.]

(Thanks! Be aware, the self-doubt here is partly performance. Conveys my mental state at the time of this ch.)
[Marginal note scribbled with CORDELIA’s hasty penmanship.]

(I had worked that out, yes.)
[AZAD’s elongated scrawl.]

You’re thinking, in the bed

You’re in the bed

Limbs swirling in the bed, and lips moving

You’re in the bed, with Twenty-Seven, and Twenty-Five

Twenty-Five is uncoiling, peeling away from you

Rising up, taking shape.

“I have been waiting,” she’s saying.

“For a long time,” she’s saying.

Twenty-Seven glances at her, squints, and nods.

“Waiting?” you say, dumbly.

“It is finally time, my darling,” says Twenty-Five, “to put my fangs to good use.”

As a kind of punctuation, she brings her hand to the top of your head, and gives it a playful pat.

By the time you manage to notice a new lightness in the mattress beneath you, Twenty-Five is already busy near the door, collecting her scattered clothes.

She is inhumanly quick, when she wants to be.

“You’re leaving?”

“Don’t worry,” she says, with a grin.

“I won’t be gone long~”

 

---

 

Twenty-Seven: Reach inside me, and feel it.

Twenty-Seven: Excavate me. Dig into me, through the soil, through the bedrock. Through the layered strata of shame. Reach the bottom. Feel it there.

Twenty-Seven: The craving. Do you feel it? Here, here it is, it cannot hide any longer—

Twenty-Seven: Forgive me, Cordelia.

Twenty-Seven: Forgive me, please. I had no idea. I had no idea that you felt these things.

Cordelia: How could you not know, when you were there? With me, in my mind? You felt it all. You lived it!

Twenty-Seven: I was not there, the first time it happened.

Cordelia: The first time . . .

Cordelia: We were in the bed, you and I and Twenty-Five. But Twenty-Five had to leave. It was only us, on the bed.

Cordelia: And you turned to me. With a new radiance about you, somehow. There, under the skylight. With a look in your eyes that was . . . that was . . .

Cordelia: And you asked me, would you like to try—?

Cordelia: Only if you feel ready—? The patience in your voice, the gentleness of the hands, and in your eyes, the look in them . . .

Cordelia: And I said yes, I said yes, yes, yes

Cordelia: And then—the ripples, the chasm—

Cordelia: In the bed, with you, and Twenty-Five, and you, and you, the ocean of you—

Twenty-Seven: Welcome home, Cordelia. Welcome home, my love.

 

---

 

Azad opens his eyes, and sees nothing but black.

He was asleep, in darkness. Now he is awake, in darkness.

He is awake.

He notices that he is sitting up, in something like an office chair. He must have slept in the chair, upright.

He cannot remember falling asleep.

What time is it? Night? All the lights are off.

Or perhaps there were never lights, in the room, to begin with.

There never were lights, were they? Only the moon.

Or were they? He ought to know. Isn’t this his house?

Or has he fallen asleep in someone else’s office chair, at someone else’s desk? At a friend’s house? At work?

In the grim little office he was given, during his graduate studies? The small, stale room with the broken pipes, the cold metal desk? The room he was given, and never used?

In the school library? He did fall asleep in there, on occasion.

Someone named Azad did, anyway. There was a spry, cocky bundle of hormones, once, who fell asleep in the school library. A knot of nerves and beastly urges, pulled tight, vibrating.

He’s long dead, now. But he did call himself Azad, in life. We have this fact on good authority. It is multiply attested, in several fragments of unearthed papyrus, from otherwise unrelated corpora.

Our Azad, though, had always lived and slept in the same place. In his house, in darkness. Under the moon.

Where is the moon, come to think of it?

It must be there, somewhere. It is always there when he wakes up. Above the bed, in the window.

There has never been anything but his house, and the moon.

“One After First Bloom,” the girl sang, finishing out a dactylic line. The rest of the song was merely a string of flower names, held together by only the bare minimum of metrical and syntactic glue.

There has never been such a thing as a flower, or a girl.

Only his house, and the moon. And the other man.

And a few other things, scattered in a corner, somewhere. Scraps of paper, old dice, dull pencils.

The word abomination, and a mess of rainbows.

And the other man.

The clumsy symbolism of the numbered women.

My book is a kind of satire on male chauvinism, the first-time novelist explains, redundantly. In the mind of Azad, our viewpoint character, the women run together into one. And so, I chose not to give them names, but only . . .

There is a clicking sound, and he is awash in a cone of light.

The glare is excruciating. He gives his eyes a moment to adjust, and then looks for its source.

A bare lightbulb, inside a metal fixture, hanging from some unseen ceiling.

Everything outside the cone of light is still invisible. He can see only the desk in front of him.

A metal desk, cold to the touch. Much like the one in his old graduate office, come to think of it.

Is it . . . is it the same desk?

From his graduate office? The one he never used?

There is a pen, on the right side of the desk, and a large stack of blank paper next to it.

On the left side of the desk, there are two books, side by side. An English dictionary, and an English thesaurus.

In the center, where the light is brightest, Azad sees another stack of paper. This one has a binding, on one side. It is a kind of magazine or leaflet, printed on cheap, thin newsprint.

Azad squints. The glare is intolerable.

A title page . . .

Some kind of . . . technical manual?

He sees the words:

LPSS-3 HEAD-MOUNTED BIDIRECTIONAL MEGACHANNEL ARRAY
USER’S MANUAL

⚠ CAUTION: Approved for research use ONLY. ⚠
⚠ CAUTION: Approved for use in Rattus norvegicus ONLY. ⚠
⚠CAUTION: Compatible ONLY with Generation 3 LPSS ASIC chips. ⚠
⚠CAUTION: Additional restrictions apply. See Appendix D. ⚠

Something flashes, in his peripheral vision.

A bundle of brown fur clambers up the left side of the desk. There are two little feet on the surface, then four.

The cat stares right at him, as if it’s expecting something.

Azad can barely see its face. A blinding halo surrounds it.

The glare of the metal, brilliant under the bulb.

“GREETING EARTH BILATERAL STACK-USER NON-CONSPECIFIC,” says a robot voice, from somewhere near the cat’s head.

“Hello there, kitty,” says Azad, warily.

“Nice kitty.”

“Azad,” says the voice of God.

God is a woman, it turns out. My book is a kind of satire on male chauvinism . . .

“Azad. My darling! My little owl!”

The voice comes from somewhere far, far above.

“My owl of Minerva.”

The girls had numbers, and they did blend together in his mind, after a while. Azad has to concede that much.

“Did you miss me?”

The less noteworthy ones did blend together, with one another.

But there are some numbers which refuse to mix with their neighbors. Paired digits seared into Azad’s memory, branding him forever.

“T—Twenty-Five?”

“It has been so long, dear. I hope you have not forgotten.”

“Forgotten . . .”

“My dying promise~”

“I will live on, as a revenant,” Azad quotes.

“I am your long, unending—”

“—nightmare!”, God squeals.

“Hell at last, after long wandering,” Azad says.

“I always knew I’d end up here, one way or another.”

“I know,” says the voice of God.

“You told me all about it,” says his ex-girlfriend, in God’s voice.

The cat is lying on its side, by Azad’s arm. It rubs him, experimentally, with its back.

“You used to lie awake, all night, as a schoolboy.

“Contemplating your flaws, and the most fitting way to punish them, in the life to come.

“You were so creative, my little owl. You were proud, weren’t you? Of the novel tortures you devised for yourself?”

“I have given the problem more thought than anyone,” Azad says.

“I would not be so sure, anymore.”

A theatrical titter, straight from God’s own sound system, booms over the unseen plains.

“Well, then!” Azad says. “Let’s not beat around the bush, shall we?

“I am yours to play with, it seems. Will you subject me to a familiar damnation, out of my own playbook?

“Or do you think you have me beat, at my own game? A breakthrough in the field of Azad Eschatology? Well, show me. I’m ready.”

“Do you remember the ‘anomalings,’ Azad?”

“Of course,” he says.

“An alien mind, gibbering obscurely.

“First, in a scientist’s code, without grammar or morphology.

“Then, in English—in a gleaming English, as obscure as the original, but rather pretty, in its odd way.

“Then, they spoke—in an English whose style was unmistakable.

“Then, they spoke—in YOUR English. AZAD’s English.

“To think: my first love was the man who gave the aliens their words!

“The tortured little boy, dreaming of hell, who took his own scars and wrote them onto the body of the world!

“My little owl of Minerva, why, that was—HIM! My own ruiner—and the world’s!”

“Uncommonly good company,” Azad says, “for your own private misery.

“Would that we were all so blessed,” he says.

“Each of our private loathings, backed by an unimpeachable grant of moral rectitude,” he says.

He barely knows what he’s trying to say, at this point. It is only talk, for the sake of talking. He cannot be seen to stumble.

“Our story, dear, does not end there. It is only beginning.

“It begins in a funny way, by curling back on itself.

“You have always suspected, haven’t you? That your hell—your true hell—will take a broadly Sisyphean shape?

“I have,” Azad says.

“Our story begins, as it first began.

“With aliens.

“With alien minds, never seen before, gibbering obscurely!

“They came to us, while you slept. They take animal forms.

“If a cat could talk, Azad, would we understand him?”

As if on cue, the brown ball of fur by Azad’s arm stirs into motion. The cat rears up into a sitting position, and fixes him with its uncanny glare.

“YOU, HOMINID,” it says.

“FELID. EMANATION,” it says.

“EVERYWHERE-HEAVEN, BENEATH.”

“I don’t understand,” Azad says.

“No one does.

“And that—my beautiful predator, my wee sweet world-ruiner—that, my love—

“—is why I have brought you back out of retirement!

“To do the thing again! Again! All over again!

“This is your fate, Azad. Like all hells, it consists mainly in the fact that you are alone, with yourself, in full knowledge of what you are.

“You are mine. You will do as I bid you.

“You will sit, in this room, alone. You will be given what is necessary for the task, and only that.

“You will apply yourself. You will give it your all. Azad’s vocation, Azad’s private refuge—”

The voice clips and crackles, on the accentuated syllables. Asked to transmit Twenty-Five in the height of her triumph, even God’s own sound system meets its limits.

“—and Azad’s eternal labor, in Azad’s hell!

“In a word?

“Translation~!”

A click, and there is silence.

Only an empty room.

A single, bare bulb. A cone of light.

A desk.

A stack of blank paper.