Borne. Jeff VanderMeer

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СКАЧАТЬ and sharing things about our home as I became old enough to appreciate them. Photographs, a ceremonial bowl my father insisted on lugging with us, my mother’s handmade jewelry, a photo album. Every time we moved and started over, my father would build things: tents or enclosures or vegetable gardens. My mother would pitch in and tend the sick, even though the countries we lived in didn’t recognize her medical license. Was it selfless? They were fighting for their lives, their identities. So, no, it was not selfless, but it helped people.

      My father must have been cheery for my sake, for my mother’s sake. She might one day be able to return to a homeland. He could not, and it was rare we met anyone who had lived on the island. The stories he told became boring to me through repetition, but I understand now that he was just trying to fix that place with the compass of his memories.

      Throughout all of this, my parents did not forget my education. Not a formal education but the education that mattered. What to value. What to hold on to. What to let go of. What to fight for and what to discard. Where the traps were.

      Once, we found a kind of peace. My father led us to another island: not the same, not at all, but whether from an impulse futile or courageous or both, he meant to re-create what he had known. We had a good life there for almost two years. A city to live in, a beach to walk on, a botanical garden, a school, playing with children who looked like me. We lived in a little two-room apartment and my dad built in the backyard an outrigger canoe with a cannibalized motor. My mother became a doctor again, working in return for goods.

      Every so often information came from the mainland that whatever might have been bad was getting worse, but my parents withheld any news from me for as long as they could, as best as they were able. Until, one day, shock: We were herded by soldiers via a crowded, diesel-spewing ferry to the mainland and another camp. The green-blue water and my father’s boat and our apartment were gone.

      It got worse after that, not better. It got worse and kept getting worse until we didn’t even have the camps. It was just us, trudging across a land that held pockets of sanity and insanity both. Kindness and cruelty, sometimes from the same source. My father carried a knife in his boot and took turns with my mother holding on to a small revolver. We were as likely to come across burned and half-buried bodies in a ditch as a farmer and his sons armed with shotguns. Once, a grinning man invited us into his house and tried to rape my mother. My father had a scar across his left arm after that and we would stay off the main roads.

      We starved at times rather than join the ranks of those marching toward an illusion, that slow, tired trudge. The back roads we took would become reduced to gray snakes against the blackness of forest or scrubland. In the distance, lights of a cabin or of a town would invoke in us dread and then caution, followed by avoidance.

      Months after we had stopped believing in refuge, there appeared on a distant hill a city so miraculous it looked at dusk like a huge crystal chandelier that had fallen to Earth or a stranded ocean liner listing on its side. I could not keep my eyes off of it and pleaded with my parents to go there. They ignored me. They were right to. It lay on our horizon for several days, and during the night of the ninth day, having rounded its eastern side, still fighting our way through forest and plain, it caught fire, all of those sparkling lights taken up in a huge conflagration that burned the darkness away for miles around.

      There came the blinking red hazard lights of bombers flying away from the city, and we so far down below marveled at the sight because it had been years since we had seen a plane of any kind. Something so old and so new. We wondered if airplanes might mean some resurgence, that some resurrection of a normal life might be upon us. But it was just an illusion. It meant nothing.

      We made our way quickly more eastward still, fearing the exodus of the survivors as if it were a wave that might drown us, and yet they were no different than us. Then came the thick, powdery black smoke during the days, gathered up in the sooty rain that fell, and out of the ground came writhing worms and rabbits and other dying things.

      Soon we would think back kindly on those days. But throughout it all, my parents held on to hope, kept trying to find a safe place. They would not give up. They never gave up. I knew that, even now that they were gone.

      There was more that I told Borne, but I can’t bring myself to write it, because it is too terrible to put into words. And it pushes up against the one thing I couldn’t remember: how I came to this city, what had happened to my parents. My last memories from before the city were of floods and makeshift rafts and the expanding silence of people dead or dying in the water—and a hint of land on the horizon. My last memories were of going down for a second, third time, my lungs full of silt.

      But when I came to, I was in the city, walking. I was walking by the river as if I had always been there.

      Alone.

      WHAT I DID NEXT, EVEN THOUGH IT MIGHT HAVE BEEN WRONG

      For every clear-eyed view of my room that took in the lack of running water, the mold that had begun its war against the constellations of fireflies embedded in my ceiling, the half-collapsing wall with the window that looked out on a mountain of dirt … for all of that, and the scenes out on the streets of one tired and dirty person fighting another person who was just as tired and dirty over a scrap the old world would have found useless or disgusting … for all of that, I still could imagine a time when the small things we used to love might be returned to us.

      “It’s just me,” Borne said and for a long time huddled on my bed, trying to recover, I didn’t answer. Not really. I just spewed words at him, lost and rambling. Wick appeared next to him from time to time and winked out again. Sometimes I would feel Wick’s arms around me. Sometimes I would see him staring at me with an expression of guilt and, I thought, of suspicion.

      Was the suspicion because of Borne? Since the attack, Borne had changed again. He had abandoned the sea-anemone shape in favor of resembling a large vase or a squid balanced on a flattened mantel. The aperture at the top had curled out and up on what I chose to interpret as a long neck, sprouting feathery filaments, which almost seemed like an affectation. The filaments, with a prolonged soft sigh, would crowd together and then pull apart again like bizarre synchronized dancers. He was tall enough now that the top of him loomed a good two feet above the bed. Colors still flitted across his body, or lazily floated in shapes like storm clouds, ragged and layered and dark. Azure. Lavender. Emerald. He frequently smelled like vanilla.

      As I lay on my side and stared at him—half curious, half afraid—I could see that Borne had developed a startling collection of eyes that encircled his body. Each eye was small and completely different from the others around it. Some were human—blue, black, brown, green pupils—and some were animal eyes, but he could see through all of them. They perplexed me because I didn’t know what they meant. I decided to think of it as a kind of odd adornment, Borne’s equivalent of a belt.

      When Borne saw me staring at him, he would make a sound like the startled clearing of a throat, and his flesh would absorb all of the eyes except two, which would migrate higher on his body and away from each other. Sometimes they would slip back down to his hips, but once in position on his torso they became larger, took on a sea-blue color, and grew long, dark lashes; they moved independent of each other.

      He must have thought he looked more normal that way.

       ¤

      On the sixth day, I felt more lucid, woke with only a slight fuzziness. Wick had gone out again, reluctant, to conduct business. He hadn’t found my attackers, and I knew he probably never would. We hadn’t talked again about what had happened, or about much of anything. I even pretended to be asleep when he came in. I had energy only for Borne.

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