Vassa in the Night (18 page)

“Erg?” I try. Grumbling shudders under my feet in answer. Whatever that is, it's sure not her. But if Erg was here, I know what she'd tell me:
Get started.
She doesn't have much patience with cowardice. And in a place like this, there's only one thing that getting started can mean.

I walk, my eyes slowly adjusting to what looks like a dim dusting of starlight. If I'm standing on a tongue, then it seems like there ought to be a brain above me, but when I look up there's nothing but yawning space and, high above, these two jagged golden crescents that I can't figure out. They look like they're spinning, sharp points wheeling at their edges. I'm still staring up at them, trying to understand, when there's a kind of unctuous squirm under my feet. It sends me sliding toward an even darker depression up ahead, slithery lumps knocking my legs from under me as I go. After a moment's denial I get it: I'm being swallowed. My hands swing out, trying to grasp at anything, but there's nothing except for the fleshy wallow of tongue and throat. And then I'm going down.

It's not slimy and constricting like a throat—even a giant one—ought to be. I'm in free fall and when my fist hits the wall there's a metallic clunk like someone dropping a tin can. A buffeting gust comes from nowhere and sends me rolling through the emptiness, and then I land. On something very soft, even furry. My hands sink into pillowing fluff, then stroke a floppy outcropping as long as my arm. In the hazy light I can just make it out.

A rabbit's ear. Too cold to be alive, though.

This is now, officially, the absolute weirdest dream I have ever had.

I stand up on a landscape of enormous taxidermy rabbits, all heaped and mashed together into bulky forms vaguely reminiscent of human organs. I wish I could say that I have the foggiest clue what it all means, but I really, truly don't. There's nothing I can do but shrug and say,
Yeah, well, dreams are like that.

As quick as that thought, I'm back on the flying motorcycle and we're starting to lift off. My motorcyclist stares straight ahead, but as my arms squeeze him reflexively from sheer astonishment he lets out an odd sound, one I'd never expected to hear from him. I'm pretty sure he's laughing, but he still seems sad.

“Vassa,” he says after a moment. “Vassa, do you see?”

“No,” I tell him bluntly. “What the hell
was
that?”

“One lost from the all. We are made so.”

I'm feeling a little pissy at how mysterious everything is, but I make an effort to puzzle it through. No matter how crazy everything seems, I'm pretty sure that he's doing his best to explain. He said before that he had been
the all above us.
“You mean like you?”

“Can that be called a man, Vassa?” His tone is strained, expectant.

“You mean what I just saw?” I say. “It was definitely not a man. It was more of a mess.” As soon as the words slip out I'm sorry. He gives a low, wounded cry and I know it's because I was so callous, so careless of his feelings.

Because maybe he was showing me things he doesn't know how to explain in words. Maybe the other motorcyclist was actually, physically constructed out of tin cans and stuffed rabbits—and if that's true, if that's not just some lunatic idea of mine, then I can see how it might be a sensitive issue.

We're flying up over a blocky field of warehouses, streetlights casting random nets of illumination.

He seems like he's still thinking it over. “Then it shouldn't
seem
to be a man,” he says at last. “What can't be should not seem. It starts to seem, even to itself. Caught by the lie.”

I think I'm getting what he means, and I feel so sorry for him that I can't speak at first. I've been doing a lousy job of saying the right thing so far, but after a while I give it another try. “You don't have to be human to be a
person.
I mean you don't have to be human to be
somebody.
I don't know you that well, but you seem like way more of a somebody than a lot of humans I know! Really.”

Above us the clouds sag like a thousand dark eggs. I feel like he's trying not to cry. I feel like he doesn't even know what crying is exactly. For a while we rise and fall together along slopes of midnight and the only sound is the stuttering wind.

“Night sees you, Vassa,” he tells me at last.

Is he trying to change the subject? “I guess the night sees everything.
If
it sees.”

He shakes his head, the huge helmet rocking from side to side. “Night sees that you … mean to be kind. To help. At first it saw only that she hated you, and that was enough … to reach out a breeze in the dark for you, to gather what was lost. Now it hears the messenger. Now it knows more.” His speech is getting more laborious, fighting its way through uncertainty. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to respond. What messenger?

“Well, I try not to be
mean,
anyway,” I tell him. “For whatever that's worth. I don't honestly think it's good for much.”

I don't think my help is good for much, either, but there's no point in telling him that. Now I can see the horizon breaking into the silver scribble of Manhattan; at this distance its skyscrapers aren't much more than splinters, but I can still recognize the general outline of the place. Maybe we're heading back to Brooklyn now. “Do we have to?” I ask him. “Go back?”

I didn't think that was an especially hard question, but he takes a long moment to consider it. “To go on dreaming…” he says softly. “Forever, Vassa?”

“It sounds like more fun than getting my head chopped off!”

Suddenly we're in the thick of Manhattan, passing between mirrored skyscrapers. Our reflections are broken and reformed into a field of scattered arms, bent legs, random scrolls of violet hair, all endlessly repeating. Then we're through and the East River slides, dark and glossy, under a dozen bridges. We dash directly above the gray spine of the Williamsburg Bridge, then over the loft building where I lived with my mom when I was small. The puddles on its roof reflect a mosaic of stars and shattered clouds. She used to take me on late-night walks across that bridge, long after all the other kids my age were fast asleep. If it was one of the times when my dad was crashing with us—which he did sometimes, for a month or two—he'd stay home sulking by the TV until we finally drifted back, bringing ice cream and champagne and wildly exaggerated stories of our adventures in the night.

It feels like she should still be here: on the roof, maybe, watching the river with a cocktail in her hand. Zinaida, more than anyone I've ever known, seemed like somebody who ought to live forever, like she was just so vital that death might decide to make an exception for her. I have to suppress an impulse to call her name.

We cross Williamsburg and then Bushwick, the J train briefly keeping pace below us on its elevated track. He's taking me back, and there's nothing I can do about it. As soon as I think that there's a quick slide to the city and BY's lunges into view, swaying on and on above a snowfield so garnet-blotched that you'd think the earth itself had started bleeding.

It's only now I realize that there was no snow in all the other places we've visited tonight. It's just here in the immediate neighborhood of my own BY's, stretching for a few blocks beyond the parking lot. I should have known. My swans have settled into a sleepy drift of feathers at the foot of Joel's stake. After all the wild disturbing bliss of the night I'm shocked by the force of my own despair as I look down on the red-ripped snow. “Don't you understand?” I ask the motorcyclist. “If I'm stuck here again, it's all over for me. Babs has me cornered.”

“Night knows you, Vassa,” he repeats; this time he sounds almost impatient.

The ground below us is starting to shimmer: faint waves of motion so subtle that I can barely make them out. It looks almost like wisps of red sand coiling through the wind. We dip lower, circling the parking lot again, but still not touching down, and the red flickering grows denser. It lifts in sinuous billows like airborne shadows or like ruby horses galloping in midair. Whatever it is, the lamplight catches it in delicate flights of sparkle. I hear myself crying out from the force of its beauty. A red wave flies across my eyes and I reach out my hand; when I peer close I can see a bright speck on my palm bizarrely magnified. It's a translucent crimson round with an indented center.

A single blood cell. Frozen into a perfect jewel.

The snow below us is paling, first to a deep raspberry pink, then to the color of seashells, then lighter still, only a waft and a breath of pink lingering in the white while around us the air scintillates with flocking rubies, all whirling up and away. There's a slight thud as we touch down and I hear myself half-laughing and half-gasping into the glimmering storm.

“Vassa,” someone says in my ear. “Vassa, you can wake up now.”

It's Erg. She's clinging in my hair, and I feel my eyes opening even though I never knew they were closed.

We're in the parking lot. I'm still sitting on the back of the motorcycle and we're going around and around on the same old clockwork course. We never left, I bet, except in our shared dream. I don't have to try to know that if I speak to the motorcyclist, either he won't be able to hear me, or I won't register his replies.

And all around us, the snow is as clean and white as the light of a brand-new sun.

 

CHAPTER 11

I'm still entranced by my dream and maybe not thinking super clearly. I watch hazily as Erg leaps onto the motorcyclist's shoulder and croons or chirps or whispers something in his ear. The sheer oddness of seeing her speak to someone who isn't me makes me wonder if I really woke up at all.

Even more surprising is that he must hear her, because we stop long enough for me to clamber off the bike while Erg crawls up my arm. I stand there in the snow, my legs and back so stiff that I know I must have been riding for ages. But I don't seem to have the serious injuries you'd expect from a collision with a moving vehicle. Did he somehow catch me and throw me on the seat behind him as he rushed at me?

He takes off again before I can even say goodbye.

“Erg?” I say, confused. “What just happened? How did you get up here?” Could Erg really leap onto a speeding motorcycle?

“It's almost morning, Vassa,” she says from just under my collar, as if that answered either question. “You can take a break soon. See, the sky is getting lighter over that way?”

“You were talking to him?” I ask; I know she wants me to drop the subject, but I can't. “Since when do you talk to other people?”

God, I sound jealous. I'm sure she can hear it. It's not super rational, maybe, but Erg is the only thing in the world that's ever been truly and entirely mine. No matter what crazy things she does sometimes, she's always been loyal to me in a way that I can't even be to myself. The thought of that ever changing is enough to shake me with suppressed panic.

“I never talk to other
people,
Vassa,” Erg coos. “You know I don't! I'm your doll all the way!”

This time I think she wants me to catch the subtext: my idea that the motorcyclist is something besides human wasn't just an artifact of my dream. It's the truth, and Erg wants to make sure I know that. “You know you
could
just tell me what you know about him, Erg. I promise I can handle it.”

Erg makes a face. “There's Babs, coming to check up on you! Oh, Babsie, the snow sure looks
pretty
this morning, doesn't it?”

“Why are you always changing the subject?” I snap, but she's already burrowing back inside my jacket. And of course she's right: I look to see Babs in her lavender bathrobe just outside the door of BY's. She's standing stock-still, gawking around at the flawless glitter of the snow, and to say that she looks perturbed would be an understatement of unprecedented size. I can't keep a grin off my face. She looks over just in time to see me beaming like a searchlight. It's probably an extremely bad idea to gloat, but I can't resist giving her a cheerful wave. Her face contorts, rolling through a whole sequence of tortured expressions before it arrives at a feeble simulation of a smile.

I smile back and run over to her, bouncing as I go. Like almost everything I do it's ill-advised but impossible to resist, at least in the moment.

“Hi, Babs! Isn't it a beautiful morning? I love the sky when it's just getting purple like this. It goes so well with my hair.”

One thing I'll give Babs: she's never been short of a snappy comeback. But now she just stares silently, keeping her white eye tucked in her face. It's like she's decided that her usual kind of cheap intimidation isn't enough under the circumstances and she's calculating what to try next.

“Vassa Lisa Lowenstein,” she chirrs at last. “But where's the rest of it, I'd like to know? Ah, and who was it performed the
operation,
for that matter? You didn't sever yourself.”