Welcome to Bordertown (19 page)

*   *   *

Spring came, dry and full of olive pollen. No one came looking for me. I kept singing and reading (
Les Fleurs du Mal
in May, and my Keats for the millionth time). Any time I managed to eat meat I just went wolf-blind with starving for it. I had become completely nocturnal, sleeping through the whole route from Starfire Station out to the suburbs and back again, my green backpack nicely padded with no-fare fines.
Light rail. Rails of light. That’s me, speeding along toward Starfire on a rail of light.
I rode longer and longer into the day, chasing the sun, and maybe I wanted to get caught. My roots got longer and I didn’t know where I was going, I just wanted to go somewhere.

I can’t say it was lonely—it’s more like you flip inside out. Everyone can see your business on the outside—too thin, hollow, bruised eyes, clothes worn into oblivion—and on the inside you just go hard and impenetrable, like metal. I stopped talking when I didn’t need to—that’s for social animals, and boy, I just wasn’t one anymore. I was something else, not a girl, not a wolf, something blank-eyed, tired, running after meat, running after trains.

One time, just before it happened, the ticket taker shook me awake.

“Kid,” he said. “Come on. Wake up. You gotta go somewhere else. I see you here every day. You can’t stay. You gotta go somewhere else.”

He had blue eyes. With the seven a.m. sunlight shining slantwise through them, they looked silvery, like crystals.

“I’m going, I’m going,” I grumbled, and stretched. I wasn’t really
listening. I was thinking about how totally amazing breakfast was, I mean, as an invention. Bacon and bread. I only thought about food abstractly anymore. The way you think about paintings. Anything I got I just tore through so fast, it didn’t really seem to exist in a cosmic sense. Hungry before, hungry after. I frowned at the fine-dispensing man. I didn’t hate the guy—adults just lived in this other world, this forbidden world, and in that world I only looked like a problem. Not his fault. Not mine. You can’t see one world from where you’re standing in the other, that’s all.

But he didn’t shove me off at the next station. Nobody else was in the car, and the sun gleamed on everything, glittering on the chrome like little supernovas. I settled back into my seat, hunching down so anyone who did come in would know to leave me alone. It’s an easy psychic telegraph:
Keep out.
Like a body is a clubhouse.

And that morning, when a grayish lump of girl got on, hauling a stiff rider of morning wind, she did leave me alone. She dropped into a heap in a seat on the far side of the car, and I was pretty sure she didn’t have a ticket either. Her clothes were thrift-store mishmash, green skirt, dingy tank top under a ragged coat with a furry, matted hood. As the train got up to speed, her head dipped back and she started to snore. The hood slid off.

It was Maria.

I mean, you wouldn’t have recognized her. But I have a memory for faces. Everyone, all the time. If I’ve seen you, I’ve seen you forever. And it was Maria, beautiful Maria, the girl who knew everything. But she was messed up, a hundred years older. Her cheekbones were cutting shards, one eye swollen like she’d been hit. Her skin was half-sunburned, half-clammy, and she had hacked all her hair off, shaved her head. It had grown back a fuzzy, uneven half inch, a thin black cloud. She had sores on her arms;
her lips were cracked and bleeding. My lips peeled back like a dog’s. Her whole body was like a threat, a ransom note that said:
Fast-forward, and this is you.

“Hey,” I whispered. She stirred sleepily. I felt awake all of a sudden, sharp. “Maria?”

I went to the girl and slid into the plastic seat beside her. Her eyes slitted up at me.

“Lemmelone, I gotta ticket,” she mumbled.

“Maria, it’s me. Fig. Diogenes, remember?” One good soul.

Her eyes rolled, unfocused. I could see the ridges in her sternum, like a bone ladder. “Fig’s a stupid name,” she slurred.

“Yeah,” I said. “It is.”

I didn’t ask her what happened to her, why she didn’t just go home if she was so busted. It’s not polite. Her breathing got shallow and she fell asleep again. Maria smelled—kind of sweet, and kind of rotten, and kind of sour. Like meat. She slumped against me and started coughing, spattering my arm with gooey strands streaked with pink. Not coughing blood like some movie girl with one big number left in her, but just about as bad.

“God, I fucking told you, Maria!” I yelled at her suddenly. “There’s no such thing as fairies or magic, and there is no city waiting for you at the end of this train. Look at you, puking your guts out on my arm. Where’s your magic? Where is it?” I was almost crying, shaking her. She promised me that stuff was real. She said we could go there. How could she do this to me? Her head flopped back and I caught it up, like a baby’s. I could see the whites of her eyes, and it just stopped me cold. Like a fist.

“Hey, hey,” I said, softer. “I’m sorry.” I tried to push her upright. “Wake up, Maria. I didn’t mean it. Wake up and tell me what a bitch I am. Come on. Don’t put this on me. I can’t take it. Wake up.”

But she didn’t. Her heart was racing, but her skin was cold.
She just sagged into my arms like a puppy. I kept thinking:
Oh god, oh god, have a seizure, whatever, just don’t die on me here, I cannot handle this. This is a safe place. Bad things don’t happen on the train. What did you take, what did you do, what was so bad you couldn’t dream about magic anymore?

“Maria, sweetie,” I said, and held her. I kissed her forehead. I couldn’t say it, but my heart filled up with the image of her glowing, pink-bedroom face below me on the bottom bunk, in the dark.
This wasn’t supposed to happen to you. The beautiful one. Titania.
And under that thought, the next one, black and ugly:
It was supposed to happen to me.
“Baby girl, just open your eyes. Like in the story. Just open your eyes and wake up.” She moaned a little and put out her hand to find my face. Housing developments with red roofs whispered by outside the windows—she coughed again, greenish, specks of dark, ugly blood in it this time.

“Okay, Maria, okay.” I shifted to hold her better and started rocking.
Shit, just stay awake till the next stop. Just don’t die. Come on, kid, you gotta go somewhere else.

“Just listen to me. Remember that place you wanted to go? Think about that place; think about the elves and the magic and you dancing with the fairies who don’t like to be called fairies. You can’t go there like this; they’d never let you in. You gotta wake up. Listen, listen.”

And I sang to her. The words just came and I sang them into her ear, her shorn head, her phlegm and her sternum and her unicorns and her wizards, and my voice came rough and quiet but it came, and I hoped I wasn’t singing her death, I hoped I was singing something better, for both of us, my broken voice and her broken body. I sang because if she could get that far gone, I could; if she wasn’t a good-enough soul for Diogenes, I never would be; if she could die, I would never get to be old. The panic in me was
like a spider, a crawling, hungry thing. I rocked her and went to that other place I go to when I sing, and the song poured out of me into her.
Think about that place, that place, that place. Let’s run away. That other place. Nothing bad ever happened to you. Nothing bad ever happened to me. We’re just two girls taking the train to school. We’ll go to class and talk about Grecian urns. You can copy off my homework. We’ll have lunch in the grass.
I sang and sang, and my voice got big in me, big enough to hurt, big enough to echo. Big enough for her. A voice like a hole. I pressed my forehead to hers and the world went away.

*   *   *

The sky shuddered from full daylight to stars and black and no moon at all with a hard lurch and a snap, like blinds zipping down.

The train car was gone, and I was sitting on a long bench with a red cushion, with Maria in my lap. We rattled along on some part-stagecoach, part–city bus beast, something out of an old movie, like we’d jumped frames. Jangling silver and bone bells hung from several posts of some kind of twisted black horn; nodding black flowers drooped from their crowns. Several long benches stretched behind me, with some folk asleep, some awake. A woman was knitting quietly in the starlight. I sat up front, Maria’s legs curled on the seat, her head in my arms. The driver wore a top hat covered in living moss with tiny clovers and thistles growing in it. The coach heaved and jerked as though horses were pulling it, and I could hear the
clop-clop
of hooves, but even in the dim light I could see that no animal pulled us along.

I started shaking—I didn’t mean to, but my body rejected what
it saw, what it felt, and I couldn’t think of anything to do or say, with this girl in my lap and this utterly wrong thing happening. There was no horse pulling the carriage-trolley, but I could hear the hoofbeats, and like a kid I seized on that, that one thing wrong out of everything, everything wrong.

I cleared my throat. I felt unused to talking to adults. “Sir,” I said to the driver. “There’s no horse.”

“This is Bordertown’s own Ye Olde Unicorn Trolley. Famous, like. I’m Master Wallscrew, at yours.”

I laughed a little, nervous. “Where’s the unicorn?”

The driver turned to grin at me from under his fuzzy green hat.

“You’re it, kid. It only works with a virgin on board. Sure and it’s not me.”

I blushed deeply, and at the same moment it hit me, hard as a broken bone: He said
Bordertown.

I shook, and felt cold, and felt hot, and my hands were clamped so tight in Maria’s coat, my fingers got fuzzy with lost circulation. I had been wrong. There was a moon out, low in the sky, almost spent, a slim rind left, hanging there like a smile. I laughed. Then I put my face in Maria’s neck and cried.

“What is it, girl?” gruffed the trolley master. “I can’t abide girls crying, I’ll warn you. Shows a fragile disposition, and brings amorous types to wipe tears away, which would pretty much sort our whole conveyance issue. Sniffle up, before some silver-haired Byron gets your scent.”

“It’s a mistake,” I said quietly.

“What’s ‘it,’ now?”

“A mistake. I’m … I’m nobody. I’m nobody. I’m not supposed to be here. It’s for her.”

I had made it and didn’t even audition. Maria auditioned with her whole heart. She had the discipline. She went down into the
dark, where I was never brave enough to go. I was supposed to mess around in the back and say nothing. I wasn’t supposed to suddenly have to function in Athens, with a lost kid in my skirts. This was Maria’s place, and she couldn’t even see it.

“Wake up, Maria, wake up,” I sobbed. “Wake up. There’s unicorns, like you said, sort of, and magic, and …”

She didn’t stir. But her breathing was better, deep and even, and she had locked her arms around my waist.

“Well, Nobody,” the driver said softly, “where to?”

I rubbed my nose, flowing with snot and tears. “What about these people? Don’t they need to get … places? Go where they want to go. We don’t care.”

“Tourists.” He shrugged. “They wait for the … uh … fuel stop, and go where the trolley goes. It’s exciting—they never know what they might see. Besides, the old monster’s not too reliable as a method of mass transit. The kids come on sometimes, to haze each other—if it goes, well, they’re not as tough as they say. But mostly we just
glide
, child. It’s part magic and part machine and neither of the parts work quite right, so sometimes you’ll say, ‘Dinner at Café Cubana, hoss,’ and it’ll take you pert as a duck to Elfhaeme Gate and you’ll be dining on fines and forms. Sometimes it’s nice as you please, right up to the door at Cubana and no fuss. Not its fault, you understand. The magic wants to go Realmward and the machine wants to go Worldward, and in a mess like that you can’t ask for any straight lines.”

“Then why ask where we’re going?”

The driver looked down at me, his blue eyes dark in the starlight, like crystals.

“It don’t run without desire, kid. Nothing does.”

Well, what do you do when you don’t know what to do? What you’ve been doing. I wanted somewhere for Maria to get well, to
get fed, to get happy again. Something like a benevolent golden Denny’s, something I could sing in front of, somewhere with coffee all night for $1.10 in a cup like a grail and just a little more room on the blank pages in the backs of my books. Just a little more room.

I didn’t say it. I didn’t say anything. But the Unicorn Trolley veered off sharply into the shadows and light of the city, into the sound of it like a wall.

And I looked over my shoulder, back toward the moon and the gnarled, thorny weeds of the road. Something banged there, hanging from an iron pole, banged in the wind and the night. On a scrap of tin that might have once been painted blue, I read: “Starfire Station.”

And just then, just then, Maria opened her eyes, bright and deep as a fairy’s.

*   *   *

And that’s my story, Mr. Din. If you don’t mind I’ll take that beer now. I still need a little something to be brave. I guess that’s better than not being brave at all. It’s Titania’s world and I’ll never be Hermia, and not Helena either. Just Fig, but not in the background. Not anymore. I still stand with the fairies with glued-on leaves, but oh, you’d better believe I’ve got lines to sing. Hail, mortals, we attend. Well met, and what ho, and all that jazz, every word, down to the last verse.

Now, I see a microphone up there, and my girl and I are hungry. May I?