Above (28 page)

Corner’s mama loved hir. Hir eyes lit up at the thought of it.
My mama was a good mama
, sie whispered dying, speaking without speaking as the men and women of Safe roared through the big door and Corner bled out on the floor ’round the blade of my gutting knife.
My mama loved me how I am.

(I nodded, and held hir hand. I couldn’t see. It was hold on or fall forever.
Go on
, I said, and squeezed my eyes shut.
Show me all of it
.)

Corner took school at home. Sie studied math and art and languages, and took the tests distant to keep pace with Normal people in schools. Sie worked until sie was seventeen, and the next year meant a university or a job, and Corner and hir mama carefully did not talk about what would happen when it came time to go out into the world.

Corner’s mama had a job. She kept order behind the counter at the community center down the block, and when Corner was young hir mama took hir to work and let hir play behind the wood-and-brick counters if sie would be good and careful and never breathe a word about being boy-girl.

Corner stayed home when sie was older; sie liked books and quiet better than the stares when sie went out, because when you were older people took it bad if they couldn’t tell. But the women at the community center still remembered hir, and it was hir they called when the accident came on.

“Your mama’s fallen down,” they said, tight and scared. It was summertime. The birds were pecking at the grass seeds the landlord had laid down, and the sun, the sun was golden like flowers. “Something’s burst up in her brain.”

Corner ran the four blocks down to the community center foot-tripping and wild, and got there just as the ambulance was ready to take hir mama away. Sie rode with her to the hospital, holding her hand, and wept as hir mama rustled and gasped underneath tubes and mask.

“I almost have the money,” Corner’s mama said dying. “Just a little longer,” before she bled herself out inside and died.

Corner stared and stared and tried to weep, because that was what you did when your mama died, but the world had tilted sideways like a dream, and so sie just held hir mama’s hand until the Whitecoats came with the big black bag to take the body away.

“Do you have someone?” the nurses asked, wanting to call hir
sweetheart
but not sure if they could, ’cause you couldn’t say
sweetheart
to boys.

“No,” Corner said, watching the cart go. “Just me. Just me and my mama.”

The nurses got hir a coffee. They sat hir in a chair. And they brought a man from Child Services, who knelt down to look at hir level with a clipboard in his hand.

(
Is Child Services Whitecoats?
I asked, quiet as I could. There was a crash and a clatter outside, and the whispering of more voices than could rightly fit in Safe hissing up and down and through the walls.

Child Services may as well be
, Corner’s ringing bloodtouch said, and shut hir eyes ’gainst weeping.)

It wasn’t a week before they found Corner was boy-girl.

They caught hir pants-down doing what, sie don’t remember. But the nice lady they’d sent hir to stay with while the lawyers did their work took one look at hir, face and roundish chest and down, and went hauling hir before the Whitecoats in the examination room.

They poked. They prodded and measured. They stood hir under bright lights (and this part I recognized, this part I knew) and talked about hir and got hir to stand wide, stand thin.

(
There were white walls and mirrors
, I said.
Yes
, replied Corner. Hir lips didn’t move with the words no more.
Yes. You know.
)

“It is too late,” they said. And: “You are not enough like a girl, and not enough like a boy.” And: “Your mama has ruined you for the world,” which made Corner clench hir fists and bare hir teeth and jump out snarling at the Whitecoat with the sad, twisted smile.

That was when Corner learned sie had the bloodtouch.

The bloodtouch feels like singing (Corner whispered in my ear from the inside on out, and my very bones shuddered as sie wept). The bloodtouch is sweet music, the very edge of life, the closer-than-close that you can hold someone at night with your fingers in their veins. Corner and hir mama were close, bound-tight close, and Corner didn’t know that Normal meant touching just on the skin, or more likely touching not at all and stiff clothes and awkward silences. Corner had suckled from hir mama’s breast. Hir mama never thought it odd that her baby child could feel her very heart beating.

The bloodtouch sang, and the Whitecoat fell like an old oak tree, kicking and twitching at the toes.

“My mama didn’t ruin me,” sie screamed as more Whitecoats hammered their way into the room, grabbed hir hands, left bruises about the wrists. “My mama called me her little angel. She said I was one of God’s children.”

They put a needle in Corner’s arm. It numbed Corner’s tongue, took away hir thoughts.

They took hir into the dark.

When Corner woke up sie checked hir private parts first thing, scared that the Whitecoats had taken one or the other away. They were still there and safe, and Corner hugged hirself tight in the corner from the relief and fear, knowing they wouldn’t stay safe long. The knowing filled hir up and left no room for thoughts and air and food.

There was also a bracelet on hir wrist, and it said
Lakeshore
.

“Why am I in a crazy hospital?” sie asked the Whitecoat they brought to talk to hir, after they’d held hir down in a chair with straps that tugged and set hir near crying.

“Because you killed your doctor,” the Whitecoat said, and the bloodtouch hummed and whistled like the happiest little bird in the world.

There were appointments. There were questions, and the food came through a little slot in the door ’cause the nurses didn’t dare open it, and there was tying-down or needles whenever the Whitecoats came. Never a body to talk to, and there were no books.

And it went on, day and night blurred bloody, until they brought Atticus in next door.

Atticus didn’t do his banging at first. They came and went with Atticus, drawing blood that Corner could feel moving float-ways through the halls, blood that flickered halfway in hir awareness. Once a week had gone, three appointments and a day when the lunch was turkey and not egg salad, Atticus began to bang.

(There was banging in my ears too. I startled, put a hand to my ear to feel the blood inside my eardrum; Corner echoing the shouts that door-beating Atticus made in his room in the burned-down Isolation ward. But no, it was real banging. It was hands breaking down the doors, the locked-shut doors where the people of Safe had crawled and hid and were dying.)

Atticus’s banging drove Corner nervous. It made hir pace the walls. It was more terrible than screaming, ’cause screaming was a thing done when one was already near-broken, and the pounding and shouting and banging of Atticus meant he thought he might someday go free. That he was tough and strong.

He got less tough and weaker with every night that passed down the drains.

It was the way the banging went shorter that broke Corner’s heart, not the act of it. It was the terrible wearing away, the way hir short sleep made hir nervous, the knowing sie could never bang like that and bust free and live good. One night the banging went on and on and on and Corner tossed in hir stretcher-bed and wept for hir mama and finally the bloodtouch rose, the bloodtouch beckoned, and it reached out the walls for Atticus’s guts and brain and heart and wrapped itself around them.

“Stop!”
sie shouted, bloodtouch humming ’round his heart, and the banging shut off so quick it might never have been there.

And then: “Who’s there?” came into the silence, and it was rasping and carrying and scared.

Sie told him. Sie told him
Angel
, and asked his name, and got it.

“Why’re you here?” Atticus asked, low and thin and drawn-scared, a kind of scared that Corner knew because sie had felt it deep in hir belly for so long it was the same as breathing.

“Because I’m Freak,” Corner said, and that is how Corner met Atticus.

They were the only of their kind to talk to. They talked all through the nights. They were both woozy and stupid for their Whitecoat appointments during the day, and their therapists frowned and stroked their chins and took down scritch-scratch notes and none could make nothing of it. None could make a thing of it because the person in charge of Isolation in the nighttime was a student, Marybeth with shy glasses and a sour face and bedtime stories she’d tell herself in some strange language. She heard the noises and the whispers and didn’t tell a word.

She read to them half-nights, stories and stories that Corner could close hir eyes against and imagine not-walls, not-floor, not-bed, and through the rest of the nights Corner stroked Atticus with the bloodtouch down every limb and in the middle. Through the long nights, locked cold in Isolation, they loved and loved and loved.

(
How’s the bloodtouch do that?
I asked, feeling it prickle down my skin.
Is it because you know both girl and boy things?

I don’t know
, Corner said. Hir eyes were shut now. Hir lips were blue under the blood.
I think I’m just Freak.
)

Corner’s therapist got madder. He got mad at hir silences, hir things unsaid. “You must choose,” he said. And Corner trembled in the big chair that was supposed to make hir comfortable, because choosing meant the knife.

Corner told Atticus, and Corner wept.

“Please,” Atticus begged, one night when Corner was supposed to be sleeping against the threat of the knife and the choice that came tomorrow, his face pressed to the slot in the door that brought the food in. “I don’t care ’bout me. Please do something for hir. Keep hir safe.”

Corner lay real still. There was a quiet.

“They’re not gonna let you out,” Doctor Marybeth said, faint on the other side.

“Yes,” replied Atticus, and the taste of sunlight-golden flashed through Corner’s bloodtouch and onto hir tongue. “I know.”

Doctor Marybeth said nothing. She walked down the hall clack-clack in her Student Doctor shoes and closed the door behind her.

It was only when Atticus swung wide hir cell-room door that Corner knew she’d left them open.

And it lasted good, for years and years, until more came down for shelter and there needed to be ruling of Safe.

(I’ve heard this Tale before. I could tell it from my skin.)

There are differences in living Safe than living penned-up in Whitecoat hands.
A person’s free
, the prickling bloodtouch said; weak, and then weaker.
They don’t take you ’way from your mama. But the food don’t come cut-up, and it goes bad for you when you don’t have hands.

Atticus’s claws were good for cutting, for the shaping and carving of Safe. They weren’t good for eating. They weren’t good for dressing. They couldn’t brush a hair back out of your eyes.

Corner fed him, every meal in secret, so the rest wouldn’t see.
Who would believe me
, he said,
that I can lead Safe, when I can’t even change my own trousers?
Sie drew his bathwater secret. Sie turned the pages of his books so they wouldn’t break snipped-up.

He came to hate hir for it.

And that was the problem in the end, Corner and Atticus, bloodtouch hands and crab-claw arms and awkward, desperate loving. They were both Beasts, and when they were in hurt, they were Beastly to each other.

Corner went walking one day after their fighting, fighting again ’bout all the things sie did for him that broke up his heart and reminded him, shell-sharp, how he’d never, ever be able to do for himself. Corner went walking one day Above, and when the day was over, there was nothing left that was home.

(
You could have stayed with Doctor Marybeth
, I said, louder than before. It was getting hard to see the pictures before my eyelids; hard to hear hir voiceless whispering over the voices, the shouting, the weeping of Whisper as she tried to wake dead eyes-open bodies and they would not wake.)

No
, Corner said. There was nothing for hir Above. There was nothing in a world where everyone looked at hir guessing boy or girl, and where the red mad of hating it could bring the bloodtouch out like spit. There was only Safe.

So Corner tried to make Safe.

There was a place hid behind a fall of rock, packed loose; a waste gutter where the sewer water ran. Four dry outflow pipes that were dead and good for storing things so they wouldn’t spoil. The stones were neat and even. There was water nearby.

It was a good place to make Safe. All it wanted for was the people.

Sie went to them in the sewers. Sie went to them hands opened, pleading hir Tale, and they struck fire. Sie whispered bloodtouch in their ears to keep hir skin and hair and bone safe, and they ran. Sie howled at the walls, and nobody listened because Atticus was the one who smiled or scowled at the Tales, and everyone believed his word true. Everyone except for Narasimha, lion-foot, who said “I’m sorry. I have a son to think of,” and continued upward, up to the light.

Nobody came.

Corner lived alone in the sewers. Corner lived in the dark with hir memories to feed hir, and when hir sight went it wasn’t a trouble, because everything worth seeing had gone shadow-lined and strange, had taken on the edge of memories.

Corner was always partway in Safe. Hir shadows curled into cracks and crannies, listened at the big door, heard the clocks strike the hour twenty-four times a day. Sie pressed them into the hands of a bee-girl, lost and lonely, who sat night after night in hir own hollow home and stared through hir like sie was a ghost. Daytimes they slipped free of the girl’s fingers and wings; wandered listening for the voice of hir Atticus love or the sound of hir own name.