1.
You don’t name it; you don’t give it a name, either. They must have names they use for each other. I don’t know what mine calls itself and if it told me, I would try to forget, I swear I would. It would not be like the secret names of dogs, which as a child I desperately wished to learn.
But the name on this envelope is mine, undeniably, printed crisp and black across the pristine paper trembling in my deathgrip. Printed, by a machine. Inside, the letter and the lump. Just like in the stories.
As if it is trying to read the words, the unnamed one visible beneath my thumbnail writhes in perfect traceries, tiny trees of green and blue. Graceful as branches in winter. The only pretty thing it makes, and even so I sometimes stain my nails with saskatoon skins so the patterns cannot be seen.
Which doesn’t work. It ensures you can see it. Always.
“Reid!”
I turn; my friend Henryk is running up the black slate steps, breathless, hair over his face. As he skids to a halt, he brings the smells of the thaw — mud, snow mould, standing water. “Hey! What’s that? Listen, they caught —”
“They?”
“They, you know. The Flags and all them. They caught that guy that was messing with kids last year!”
Messing with. He cannot, neither of us can, say the words. “Did they really catch him?”
“Oh yeah, they got him tied up in the quad.”
“Hen, you fucking . . .” I close my eyes for a moment. “I mean, did they catch the right guy?”
“Oh that. I don’t know. I suppose they must have.” He pauses, and adds weakly, in the face of my silence, “They tied him up. I saw.”
I look at my hands again, the whole landscape in miniature. White paper, black ink, green trees under my nails. The thing stilled for the moment: eavesdropping, too intent to squirm. “They gonna hang him?”
“Probably.”
“Gross.” I pause, because the answer doesn’t matter, but I still have to ask. “Is he . . . does he have . . .”
“Cad? No.”
“Fuck.”
Henryk’s eyes are large, loyal, a dirty no-colour, like sky. He says what he knows I cannot: “But sometimes I wish you could give it to people, you know? Some people. Who deserve it.”
I know he doesn’t mean me when he says you. That forestalls any hurt feelings.
At any rate we both know you can’t. Cad doesn’t move sideways. It appears spontaneously: and then implacably, silently, it moves down through genes and time like water seeking its lowest level. A heritable symbiont, they used to call it. Once and only once, I cried out to Henryk, But it’s not, it’s a fucking parasite, and the pain that shot through me was impossible to describe. As I imagined being struck by lightning would feel. Sight gone, sound gone, a roaring whiteness, transfixed throat to heels as if on a pole of molten metal hurled by a god. I never said it again.
This thing is of me, does not belong to me. Is its own thing. Speaks its own tongue. A semi-sapient fungus scribbling across my skin and the skin of my ancestors in crayon colours, turquoise, viridian, cerulean, pine. I imagine it listening now, keenly, sipping my happiness. Hatred twists my face before I can force it back down.
“Are you okay?” Henryk says, as if we had not just said aloud that the worst punishment for a child molester should be the transmission of my own disease. “Is it . . . do you think it’s . . . ”
“Getting worse? I don’t think so.”
“But you would know.”
“Yeah. It makes sure you know.” I don’t want to think about it anymore. Quick, change the subject. Easy enough, given the morning’s coup. “Look what I got.”
“Holy shit. Holy shit. Is that — it can’t!”
His shock is gratifying. I didn’t think I’d get to tell him first, but I wanted to tell someone. I’m glad it was him, I realize. Everything he feels just pours from him like sunshine through a window, he cannot help it, he has no shadows in him.
“How is this even possible?!” He throws an arm awkwardly around my shoulder, startling me nearly off the step. “Reid! Oh my God. You got in! Look at you! You got in! Do you know what the odds are against that? Do you know —”
“Actually, they put it in the letter. See?” I unfold the crackling thing, Dear Ms. Reid Graham, We have received your application to Howse University and are extremely pleased to confirm your acceptance, and hand it to him. His fingers are black with dirt, but the paper seems to disregard it; nothing transfers.
Henryk’s face is as red as mine feels. Blushing, squirming, they used to say “an embarrassment of riches,” and only now, when no one is rich, do we know how it feels. I try to compare it to anything in my life, one single thing, and nothing happens; my memory is empty of such a sensation. My heart is going so fast I can hear it in my throat.
“The paper,” he whispers.
“It’s so weird.”
“It’s so weird.”
The material is your first clue that we are out of our league. The only new paper we’ve ever seen has been grey, gritty, stiff, recycled a hundred times. From the accounts in books, themselves printed on ancient paper that still seems impossibly new, I know it can be made out of trees. But you don’t dare make anything out of a tree now; they are too young and too few, and therefore too precious, to kill for something as frivolous as paper.
And this is not. It says (brightly, in tones of wonder) that it’s spider silk generated by GMO bacteria, processed, purified. The entire sentence is an impossibility. This stuff, this pristine, even glowing white surface, is proof positive of a better world somewhere — carried a thousand klicks through who knows what, and still as clean as fresh snow.
And the best part: “Come here for a sec.” We scuttle off the steps and plunge into the market, weaving through booths, stoves, banners, tents, blankets, shelves, till we find a low-ceilinged niche at the back. No windows of course, we’re below ground level, but everyone has lamps going, and this will be more impressive in real dark. “Try to rip it.”
“What? No. Absolutely not. It’s your acceptance letter.”
“Trust me.”
“Trust you,” he echoes. “Remember when you told me that that wasp nest on the corner of St. Joseph’s was a —”
“That was years ago. Are you ever going to forgive me for that?”
“No. I’m gonna hate you for a thousand lifetimes.”
We crowd into the corner, blocking the light with our bodies, and I tug on a corner of the letter as hard as I can.
It rips, but reluctantly — like gristle. Light flowers at the paper’s edges for a split second, and then slowly, reproachfully, it knits itself back together, threads reaching for each other, grasping across the abyss. On my fingertips, it feels like the footsteps of ants. The light shines through my hands to paint tiny landscapes, red sky of skin and blood, black trees where the glow cannot go.
“Hooooooooly shit. It makes its own light!”
“Thou hast said ’t, Caiaphas,” I whisper back. “I got it just before sunrise, and it was just . . . I can’t believe it. I can’t believe it.”
Act casual: lean on the wall. We try to get our bearings, stretch our minds till they can wrap around this, and still they cannot; I can’t believe I had become so smallminded. Even the ink is a miracle, black and sharp. We write on our uneven grey paper in root dyes. Ours is a very low-contrast sort of world, requiring close study and getting fuzzier by the day. Little kids complain about the painful clarity of their scavenged schoolbooks: The writing’s too bright, they say. It hurts my eyes. This, from nothing more than old paper, which does not carry its own light.
“How does it all work? Does the university send someone to come get you? I thought they never left the domes.”
“I don’t think they do. Otherwise they’d be out recruiting, wouldn’t they? They sent a little tracker — sort of a, like a, well . . . ”
“Can I see?”
I place it in his dirty palm: a nondescript silver sphere the size of a hazelnut, hung on a light cord of strange material. At its equator a tiny blue light pulses, obeying some instinct or directive that we cannot perceive. “You activate it when you’re past the Zone marker, and then they come get you.”
He hands it back, impressed. “So they can stay secret or whatever.”
“I guess.” Secret or whatever: I know what he means though. A secret not like our private strawberry patch, but like the hidden schools of wizardry in old books. Mystery, power, esoteric knowledge, and all the riches that must attend these things. Science tangible but no different from magic now, because we cannot replicate it, which we were taught is the point of science: research, which is to say, you can find it again.
Instead the acceptance says: What do you believe in? And the tracker says: Believe in me.
It says one more thing, which is We, in turn, believe in you. Because they are trusting me to get to the Zone on my own, and in a little under two weeks. Non-negotiable. Some people would say it is a demand. To me, it speaks of confidence in my abilities, in their choice.
My hands are shaking. Henryk laughs at this, not mocking but glad, awed, hanging absently on the sleeve of my jacket like he used to do when we were little. We stare out at the market as it gets going: stalls rolling up, tents coming down. Ordinary morning. Laughing. Kids zipping around like sparrows.
It’s all so preposterous; when I opened the envelope this morning, I guffawed, absolutely reflexively and all alone, like a cough. In my disbelief I thought it was best that no one else know. It’s a joke, it’s a prank, a fairytale. That you should be Cinderella, nineteen years old, sweeping and dancing and singing to the birds in the crumbling remnants of a city and a planet brought to its knees, infected with the strangest disease ever seen, and one day a being made of light comes and waves a wand over your head: Go to the ball. Here is your gown.
“Your mom must have freaked out.”
My heart crawls into my throat and stays there. “I didn’t tell her yet.”
“Oh my God! Seriously? I’ll walk you up.” He pauses before we get going, and adds, “It sucks that . . .”
I know. I know. In his silence, which might strike an outside listener as embarrassed or unsure, I hear what he means to say: What mars today is that the person who would have been proudest of this is not here. ...
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