A Paradigm of Earth (31 page)

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Authors: Candas Jane Dorsey

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BOOK: A Paradigm of Earth
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“Couldn’t you tell?”
“I was busy with Anne, and I was trying not to eavesdrop. But after. After, I was—having a very strange—dream, I think, dream, yes. But I could not understand. It was like a book you have given me to read. Like many books. Almost like the dreams I found in Jakob when I first learned what dreaming was, first tried to use it. He does not use it, it is a movie in his thoughts. I am thinking about him now. Your dream was like mine. Or, mine was like yours.”
“That is like knowing that some tribal peoples counted by eights because they count the spaces between their fingers. Or seeing the rays of sun through the clouds as the shadows of the clouds, instead of as the light through them. You are very good with the ambiguities now.”
“I am a learning machine.”
“With a heart.”
“I don’t know enough. Your world makes it so hard to learn about what I need to know to love, to be.”
“You should have come into a different language. English is bad for that.” Suddenly: “No more my world than yours!” Despite the slow regrowth of feeling for the world, she believed that. Knowing how much love she had for it, not like Russ who would turn and walk away and yet was bound forever to Earth. For her it was a perfect place to be, yet she felt still a sojourner there. She looked across the room with new vision to the only one of her kind who was in this small part of the world with her. Blue’s gaze sharpened in a parody, unconscious, an echo of Morgan’s.
“Now?”
“Maybe. Yes. Yes, I think so.”
They moved slowly together, and the eyes fixed on each other’s were widening, becoming the universe. The heat of that blue body engulfed her. In her understanding there was also terror, from where? From Blue, and the blue hands met Morgan’s hands with a shock, like entry. The hot hands, the fire, reaching for Morgan’s face, suddenly their dream was between them, the terror of it, and she clenched her hands around the thin blue wrists, holding the hands in space immobile, strength for strength, while waves and waves of fear and sorrow and fear washed across them both.
“Oh, no, what is that?” Morgan gasped.
“I don’t know. Something … Jakob? I am afraid … . I think I know, and if I know … Let me think.” Turning abruptly to the window, forehead against the glass.
It was another of Jakob’s gestures. Morgan thought:
I see us in this one
,
through what this one really is terrifies me again as it never did when the alienness showed so much at the beginning. Now like a chameleon Blue has masqueraded as one of us
,
a dancer, a talker, a cook, a lover, a dreamer—but what Blue is, really, is no more clear than at the beginning. And even more than I fear that ambiguity I fear the insight that I am more like Blue than I am like any other human being. That is not a safe insight any more.
Morgan put her hand on Blue’s shoulder. The body heat burned her again. She thought she was used to the details: she had been, but not now: how could that slim body that could be so languid burn so fiercely? How could that cool blue facade contain this furnace? What was the fear, the horror that they both were feeling at this moment? Did it come from between them, or somewhere else?
Blue did not turn for a moment, a moment that seemed ancient as the adrenaline pulled the world into slow motion, and Morgan couldn’t make that turn happen, and anyway was afraid to see the eyes, just now.
“Are you everything I think you are, or are you something so alien I can never know you, only live in terror?”
“Yes. No. I am very—confused? Scared? It is wrong, it is the wrong feeling. We must—”
“—find Jakob,” finished Morgan, suddenly understanding.
From a state of paralysis and confusion had emerged, suddenly, focus—on urgency and sharp fear. For a moment the two of them were frozen in place, listening to something inaudible but tangible.
“In the back yard somewhere,” said Morgan, and Blue said, “Outside the gate. Oh, Morgan, it is real. I didn’t think it was real.”
Unmindful of their night attire, they ran through the shadowed yard, Morgan calling Jakob’s name—but the person who responded was Ace, loping sharply through the archway, face white.
“What are you doing here?”
“Something’s wrong with Jakob …”
“Is it Jakob? How the hell did you know? Never mind, come, maybe you can give me an ID …” but Morgan and Blue had passed her already, passed through the gate into the relentless sodium streetlight lighting the scene like a stage set.
Jakob lay tumbled against the fence like leaf mulch, his draperies wound around his face and throat. At least, something with Jakob’s clothes on. Morgan fell to her knees on the curb.
“Don’t touch anything,” said Ace.
“But first aid …”
“Too late.”
Morgan could see one hand, at the end of an upflung arm: the hand was a flat slate color, lighter on the palm, like a greasy rag.
He must be dead
, she thought. In the background, as she leaned over his body, she heard angry voices.
“For chrissakes, Ace, what’re they doing here? The guy’s a mess!” It was “Randy”—May.
Morgan wanted to pull the fabric away, but she knew better—even if she could not see how deeply one fold was buried in Jakob’s neck.
“I just thought she could—save us a lot of time.”
His fingernails were broken and his hand was stained with blood and grass.
“Don’t you know procedure?”
One of his flowing trouser-legs was rucked up around his thigh, and the waistband and buttons were torn down so that his genitals were exposed.
“You should talk. Fuck procedure. I want to know what we’re dealing with here. I’m sure McKenzie will back us up …”
Or what were his genitals before they were mutilated: she couldn’t make sense of the blood and minced meat spilling from the sliced skin. She averted her eyes. Then Ace had turned back to Morgan, lifting her up and away. “Is it Jakob? Or is it one of the other guys at the party? That Salman guy? Aziz? Lorne? That kid with Nancy? They were all wearing these …”
“Jakob.”
“Fine. I’ll take you back inside.”
“I can walk. Blue …”
But Blue was not there, was running ahead of her to the house, and she could only walk so far. Inside, she fell against the doorframe, and it seemed not at all strange to her that when she folded over in anguish, Delany’s chair slid toward her and her head came to rest on Delany’s lap. Blue knelt beside them, shaking.
Nor did it seem strange until later that it was her Mr. Grey who lifted Blue away and guided the alien to a chair, then turned to lift her and support her down the hall to the living room.
“I’m all right. Help Blue.”
“Delany’s helping Blue,” he said. “You’re not all right.” Against her protests, he helped her lie down on the couch, tucked an afghan around her. She knew she should be going to Blue—but when she tried to rise, she saw that Blue was already lying on the other couch, with Delany leaning over to tuck in a cover, and murmuring softly to the frightened alien who clutched at her hands.
Mr. Grey loomed over Morgan again. He had brought back a cup of sweet, hot, strong tea for each of them. “Gack,” she choked, when she sipped it.
“Good for shock,” he said. “Drink it fast. It doesn’t have to taste good.” He had another cup for himself, demonstrated by knocking the cupful back like a hangover cure. She followed suit, only to feel the hot liquid scald as it went down. She coughed and gagged.
“Never mind,” Delany said. “Shows you’re alive.”
“But Jakob isn’t,” said Morgan.
“No,” said the grey man. “He’s not.”
 
A triumph of community relations
 
Marbl was crying by Russ’s door, patting and scrabbling with her paws at the edge of the door, but the handle was latched so she couldn’t push it open. Morgan picked her up, occasion for a little howl, put her down in the center of the corridor, opened Russ’s door, and went in.
The light was off; he was lying on his bed face down, crying. He was not used to crying, and his throat was tight with the sounds. He didn’t hear the door open and close. Morgan stood for a moment in the half-darkness, her own eyes starting into tears. Then she went to sit beside him, put her hands on his back. He tensed, his sobs stopped.
“Don’t stop crying, you need it,” she said. He turned over, an earthquake.
“What good does it do? He won’t be back, no matter how long I cry.” His face was twisted with grief and anger.
“We can do him the honor to grieve for him as much as we loved him,” said Morgan. “He may not notice, but we will.”
“It’s the same mistake, to love him that much in the first place,” said Russ savagely.
“Do you really think that?” Morgan gave him a moment, then put her hand on his neck where it met the shoulder, looked closely at him. She spoke slowly, watching each phrase open him a little, trying to open him more. “Do you really want that? Do you think it would have been better never to have looked into his face with those long bones and tight skin, to never see his eyes smiling for you, to never feel his hands on your face or your body or your cock, to never feel that sweet pleasure coursing through you, to never hold him, to never put your mouth against his smoothness? Do you want all that gone from your memory?”
“What do you know about that?”
“I saw your face open up for me, and I was only a challenge to you. He was a lover. Do you really wish you’d never seen his face while you were making love with him?”
“Stop it! Yes, I wish it. What’s the use of getting involved?”
“You sound like a cliché from the nineties. What do you think life is for, to make you comfortable and secure?” She grasped his upper arm strongly. “Jakob is dead, Russ, but you’re alive, and you remember him. Is that invalidated because it won’t go on? Then his life means nothing.”
“What do you know about that?”
“Why is it I’m always here telling you what a self-pitying prig you are? My parents are dead too, not much more than a year ago, and on the same day. Do you think I didn’t love them? My father died long before he should have, with me holding his hand; my mother chose to leave us for his sake no matter what it did to us. Do you think I’m a psychopath, that I can’t feel it? Jakob is dead. Do you think I didn’t love him? He was my friend too. Who the fuck do you think you are? You’re just another one like the rest of us—human. As the poet says, ‘Alive and stuck with it.’”
“Okay, it was wrong. But that doesn’t change me. If this is alive and stuck with it, forget it. If this is human, love ’em and lose ’em, forget it. I’m not going to go through all this again. I feel enough like a murderer already!” and he turned away from her, got up to stand at the window, looking out on nothing. She put her hands on his back, and he shrugged them away.
“It’s not th-that I shouldn’t have,” he said, slowly, with difficulty controlling his voice. “It’s that I didn’t do it sooner. It’s not easy to reach out, and Jakob won’t, wouldn’t seduce. He’s, he was scrupulous that way, for all his verbal games. So I wasted so much t-time …” He slammed the flat of his hand against the windowframe.
“I’m sorry I lost my temper,” she said. “I guess that I—believe in love, whenever possible.”
“Yeah, I know you do. It’s admirable of you.” He leaned his forehead on his hand, against the windowframe, and spoke quietly. “We didn’t have as good a time as you think. I couldn’t—I couldn’t touch him the way I should have. I just didn’t know how, I said, but that was a lie. I found all kinds of reasons—but the main one was that I thought I’d have another chance. I fucked up.”
“He knew how you felt about him, anyway. Don’t you think that’s good for something?”
“No.”
Morgan waited, but he said no more, and again he shrugged off her attempts to comfort him.
“I hope you cry some more,” she said finally, and turned to the door.
“Morgan,” he said, and when she faced him he had turned to her.
“What?”
“Thanks for coming here.”
“Even if it did no good?”
“It did some good. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. You’re always welcome, you know that.”
He passed a hand across his face with a weary wiping gesture. His look was blank. After a moment Morgan realized that he was not looking at her, and she went. At the door she looked back again, and he was still staring at the point beside the door where she used to be.
“How did you know there was something wrong with him?” asked the man in the blue suit. She knew his name was Kowalski, but a name didn’t seem to stick to him, slid off his rumpled surface into generics.
She turned with a frown. “Blue …”
“Blue told you?”
“No! We both …”
“‘Felt something was wrong.’ You said that. But on the tapes there was something about dreaming, and Blue was the one who …”
“Ko.” It was the grey man. “That will do.”
“Mac …”
“We had a precognitive dream,” said Morgan defensively. “It happens. My mother used to have them all the time, when somebody died. I’m sorry.”
How could a man that puffy look so stiff with outrage?
she wondered irrelevantly. She watched the grey man jerk his head toward the door, send the other man away.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I never had them before this year. I didn’t know they ran in the family.”
“Don’t make it worse,” the gray man said. “This isn’t genetic.”
“Are you going to take Blue away? Back to the Atr … ?”
“Blue is staying right here.”
She almost fell with the release brought by relief. She pulled the kitchen chair she was leaning on back around and sat down. “Oh, oh, oh my, I was so sure … Why on earth—how on earth can you let that … ?”
“No flies on you,” he said, and sat down too. He put his head in the cradle of his hands. From behind his palms, his voice was muffled.
“The Prime Minister considers the presence of Blue in the community a triumph of public relations. Public relations! She considers the fact that the Canadian government is allowing their alien to stay with a non-standard family unit refutes the recent accusations at the United Nations of Canadian government intolerance of and human rights violations against the disabled and those with alternative lifestyles and political opinions. She considers the deaths to be efforts of foreign terrorists or political interests, or both, to undermine this openness—which, believe me, we have considered, and rounded up all the usual suspects twice over, and we’re starting again at the top of the list. Then she refers to
glasnost
in an attempt to embarrass the Russians. She refers to prison camps in an attempt to embarrass the Chinese. She even takes a shot at traditional families in an attempt to embarrass the English. She supports the choices that senior officials at CSIS have made to normalize life for the alien.”
Morgan couldn’t help laughing, even though it came out as a rather grim bark. “You must be relieved too.”
“Someday,” said the grey man, “perhaps you will meet my mother.”
He couldn’t see Morgan’s puzzled look, and carried on talking to the Arborite surface of the table.
“My mother is in her late nineties now. I was born when she was forty-five. Her name is Derwyn. I bet you’d like her. Once, when she was impatient about me not thinking for myself and for being too dependent on external validation, she said witheringly, ‘Would you want Hitler to approve of you?’ I’ve often used it to remind myself not to care about the approval of people I don’t respect. But this … .”
Morgan saw the light. “All of a sudden, Hitler
does
approve of you. So to speak. A whole new spin.”
“You got it in one,” said the grey man.
“Quite a morning after,” said Delany quietly. “I’m sorry, my dear heart, that you have to go through this.”
“We all have to go through this.”
“But you knew him best.”
“I didn’t know him any better than—”
“Sweetie, he didn’t have the time of day for me. I’m a grrrl. A het grrrl, too, he thought. I wish he could have lived to find out different. Actually, I wish he could have lived. I’m angry about that. But I didn’t know him. Like you did.”
“Nobody knows anybody,” Morgan said.
“You know us, sweetie,” said Delany, “and strangely enough, we know you. Can’t avoid that. Sorry.”
Morgan smiled at her. “I’m sorry too. Maybe I was being …”
“Self-indulgent? Only a little. And why not? You’re carrying quite a load.”
“Listen,” said Morgan just as Delany said, “But what I mean to say is—”
They stopped and stared at each other. Delany reached out and pulled Morgan’s hand until Morgan leaned over to her. Delany cupped a hand behind her head, kissed Morgan sweetly on the mouth, then the cheek. “I’m here,” Delany said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“I was just thinking that,” said Morgan. “There’s lots of time. For us.”
Jakob’s lost time hung in the air between them. Their smiles to each other were bleak with it.
“He asked me to sleep with him,” said John, face on hands. “If I’d known, I would have.”
Interesting
, thought Morgan,
but do I believe it?
“What you mean to convey to me is, if you could bring him back by doing it, you would. But I don’t think so.”
Damn, when will they leave me alone, all these people using me to wash away their guilt, letting their grief wash over me, when will they leave me alone to do my own crying?
Looking at John, who thought you could buy off death with a little insincere cocksucking,
leave me alone.
Finally he took his cup of coffee away. His absence was welcome but like a backbone removed from her. The hard table under her arms, her cheek. It was hitting her again, again, as it did ten times an hour,
gone, my brother, my dancing dear heart, the dancing, to stop, to never see again, to crumble, to rot, to fade away, to forget, ah, my dear, my crazy failed sybarite, who became part of this family I have made, why did you … no cannot talk to you any more, and where has all that energy gone, that was torn out of him? broken, torn, my loved one, my darling, the one who taught me to dance, no more dancing, no more circle of hands joined and raised, those hands, so long and thin ah, Jakob, Jakob
—
—and hands were raising her, and arms were holding her bitter and convulsed against a warm hard shoulder, Blue, holding her, singing a little song like a lullaby, rocking her.
Some of them say you killed him, blue one.
No. No, not I. I did not save him either. I have my own grief.
I don’t understand. He was one of us.
So am I. And I knew him.
A bitter moment of shame that she would take that away from this one because of blue skin and a foreign birth.
I’m sorry. But if you are lying to me, if you killed him, I—
I am not lying. Believe. But I could have stopped it, and I did not understand. I was so stupid! I will know that as long as I know anything.
I don’t understand.
Neither do I, but I am learning. I will soon be as human as you. And if I find that one, if I solve the puzzle, it will kill no more, if I am here.
It’s wrong to kill.
I won’t have to kill.
What do you mean?
If you would learn, dream with me, I would show you. Maybe you would make a sense of it, help me understand.
Not yet. Not now.
No. I know that. But sometime …
—and she drew back and looked into those eyes, in the silent kitchen.
Now you know what we can do, said Blue.
“I can’t …” Morgan said aloud, “ … on top of all this.”
“It could only happen because you were open. Believe in me, Morgan. I’ll need it.”
“You sound so …”
“So human?”
“Yes.”
“But I told you, that is what I am here for. Every day I become more human.”
“I have seen that.”
“You are changing too.”
“It is life. Life happens, and changes one.” Snort of laughter for her deliberate pronoun.
Jakob, oh
… Snort of tears, a sob. The warm arms tightened. “There has been a lot of death for you, too.”
“For everyone. Human death, a little every day. Didn’t you tell me so? On our way toward death, and we meet it on the path.”

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