Here’s a free story from my collection Born From Ash. This one’s a complex tale of stasis and creation in the hydrocarbon sink of an alien planet. Enjoy!
Asked to give an autobiographical genesis for ‘Borova Nightfall,’ one of the very earliest of the mature stories I wrote in my teens, I would probably tell you a sordid little tale about how there had been an old upright piano in the corner of our living room at home. Nobody ever played it to my knowledge. It sat there collecting dust with the lid firmly down and all kinds of bric-a-brac piled up against it, just a notch taken out of the corner of the room.
One night, and I have no idea why, I crept down to the living room, pushed aside the bric-a-brac, and unlatched the front panel under the keyboard. I was hoping, I guess, for a glimpse of the secret workings of this thing, the hammers and harp. What I found was a collection of pornographic magazines shoved in there against the strings.
Later I remember my father smashing the piano to pieces in the back garden. For years there would be pieces of piano mechanism in the dirt and weeds: oddly-shaped bits of wood and ivory yellow as teeth.
Build that into a psychology if you like. I think I dreamed the whole episode, though the pieces of piano mechanism in the back garden were real enough. But ‘Borova Nightfall’ isn’t really to do with a father at all, regardless of what it seems to be. It’s actually about a mother.
Both my parents are dead, and the emotions that are laced so thickly into this story have long ossified. Most of the particulars are still vivid, but inconsequential to the reader. I can tell you, for example, that the story is actually set not on an alien planet but in a dead-of-winter park in Boscombe on the shore of southern England. We would travel there as a family to visit my mother’s dying mother, who was at the time living in a one-room apartment with a man with one leg. He would feed me bitter lemonade. I loved bitter lemonade. He never once offered to show me his stump.
Once the car broke down and we had to spend the night there, all of us piled in that one room.
My father and I escaped these visits as soon as we could. We would excuse ourselves and walk down through the park to the beach. The park was a slow dripping silence where only the squirrels moved. There were squirrels all the way down. Eventually you broke back into sharp-tongued sunlight and Boscombe’s then-derelict but still accessible pier. All these things, and many more memories of those times, are in the story.
As dedicated Maas watchers may know, this piece was actually written, back in my teens, as the first chapter of a novel I wanted to write which I was determined was going to be titled Grand Fuck Central. I eventually did write the novel, and published it under a slightly amended title, and you likely wouldn’t credit that the two things were originally one and the same.
But it’s true: and ‘Borova Nightfall,’ consciously redolent of my first bad acid trip, is quite likely the most significant thing I ever wrote in my school days, give or take a couple of love letters and the first heroic draft of Hemisphere. All the obsessions of my adulthood are already here, the ever-aching mystery and the incomprehensible pain.
Eventually I chose to end my collection Born From Ash with the story. There was nowhere else it could have been placed, given its closing of a curtain into darkness, and its final ironic word. But for me it was the start.
BOROVA NIGHTFALL by Robert Maas
See those two girls down there in the black coats with their hoods drawn up? That’s Dorothy and me, standing on the seafront in Borova. Maybe you can differentiate us from the hard charcoal lines of the promenade and the swift strokes of the city that leans over us so precipitously.
There, see, twin smudges of orange-pink, two faces in the gray. Dorothy and me, waiting for father to return from the English culture classes he teaches in one of those serrated metal constructions they call buildings here, but to me look more like a collection of rusty knife blades stuck at an angle into the wind.
This scrabbly grain is the grit in the air, coming in hard over the hydrocarbon sink of the ocean. You can feel it embedding in your skin, lodging in all the creases. You can feel it drying your hair, smarting your eyes, packing in your lungs even with the throat-filters the Colfoni trade board makes us wear. When we take baths in Borova, sharing a precious barrel of cold water siphoned from the recycler, it’s always brown by the time Dorothy and I finish our turns. The grit is a magnetic scree, like a low-quality interference overlaid on the city.
It’s winter in Borova, but that comes with the planet. One of the suns is a microwave flicker, insistent in the back of the brain. The other is its mirror, an infrared glow that drags up slowly tumbling columns from the ocean out where the big animals roll and snort. There are nights of glowing coals burning pinholes in the stretched parchment of the sky. Whatever Colfoni once used to be, a reasonably intelligent and compliant dominant species soon turned it into our industrial center for this part of the galaxy. A couple centuries later there was nothing left but heavy metal cities like Borova, relentlessly sawing the atmosphere on the edge of an acetone-pelted sea.
We lean together, too, just like the buildings. You can see by our bent backs, side by side under the balcony rail that forms a sharp line above our heads but is waist-high to a native adult anzoor. Behind us the dead city hunkers into a pall of black fog, its deserted roads and frozen wharves strewn with anzoori vehicles littered like wrecks across the rain-puddled steel, a haze of bleached-out hoardings bereft of all but the leafless structures of what they call ranoza trees but which are in fact a form of marine coral growing insidiously out of cracks in the metal. To me they look like X-rays.
The streets ring with random, painful reverberations, slowly decaying like echoes of distant warfare, throbbing and dying. The anzoori homes are shadowy barracks with windows like glazed insensible eyes. There’s a buzzing, insistent back-beat in the air, the undertow of riot.
Below us the beach seeps glumly into the sea, a mess of brittle styrofoam food containers quietly disintegrating in the chill. It gives off a rank smell, like glue.
Sometimes the microwave sun appears, bristling like static feeding through the atmosphere. Other times the infrared sun comes muted by cloud, shifted to a pall of brown that arches over the city like figures dancing and weeping, or like nightmares glimpsed down a long corridor of sleep.
We live in Borova, Dorothy and I. This has been home to my sister since before she was born, but I remember Earth.
I shiver in my thin coat, stamping at the rain-rotted iron of the promenade. Splinters of soft, spongy metal break off, red under the surface. There’s a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach, one that has lingered with me all day like hunger despite a stomach full of greasy shafolli meat wolfed down for lunch in Paradise Park, which is what some early colonists called the human quarter in Borova. The name was ugly enough to remain long after the irony had lost its bite. Today most people call it the Park, but if you want to really express disgust, use the other word.
Dorothy refused the meat. She would only take the small, brown, over-fried fragments and shrivels of hard crunchy batter, but father and I ate with an appetite, scraping the sodden clumps from the styrofoam and sucking the dissolved salt from our fingertips.
Just out of the frame of this painting is the anzoori juvenile that stands on its fleshless hind legs a short distance along the promenade staring back at us. The anzoor, our hosts and putative servants, have three distinct body shapes. After infancy, the crablike child splits from its carapace into a juvenile, a roughly humanoid biped twice as tall as me, and I’m a twelve year old Earth girl in this picture, where it remains for about twenty revolutions of the slower red sun. It gets no taller or bulkier to my knowledge. Then, abruptly, it splits again, and grows the massive metallic appendages and complex baleen-like feeding apparatus of the adult. It is only during this relatively brief juvenile phase that the anzoor are even remotely something we could understand. It is even said that when the first men came to Colfoni they tried to discourse with the juveniles, as the only animal here they considered humanoid enough to be intelligent.
Anzoori juveniles have hard, cantilevered legs but fleshy bare bodies, hollow chests and four short manipulative arms. Their heads are long and narrow, with a black blank eye on either side. They seem to see in only the ultraviolet half of the spectrum — at least, they become inactive whenever the microwave sun sets, and rise when it does. They ignore the red sun altogether, except they must be aware of it since the perturbations it causes in the ocean and in the cycles of their prey animals are the means by which they calculate the passage of time.
Around their waists, the juveniles sport a ruff of orange quills that hide their groins. Sometimes they raise these quills in anger or in shows of prowess, but I am still not sure they have genders. Their exposed bodies are very complicated.
Now, as we stand side by side gazing at the anzoori juvenile across the rainy metal slabs of the promenade, its quills are half raised, a preliminary to attack. Its mouth makes a peculiar sucking noise. We know it is doing these things in reaction to us because its body is bent in our direction and its snout pushed out so that we can see the yellow rims of its chewing bones. We have come to understand the expression, but we stand motionless at the rail. There’s nowhere for us to run. Though anzoori juveniles understand English commands, they communicate only by gestures. The adults talk in a throaty, guttural and woefully restricted syllabary, from which we know all their local terms, but never to humans.
All of a sudden the juvenile hoots and beats away into the nearest passage that cuts under the jagged rim of the city. Its feet ring off the metal. Only when we see father approaching do we understand why. It saw the human teacher, knew it had been absent from class, and disappeared before he could reprimand it or give it homework.
Father, hunched into himself with all the planet under his arm, crosses the promenade pool by pool and stands beside us. We take his hands silently. His own head barely grazes the rail.
“Look,” Dorothy tells him as a means of greeting.
He peers out into the sea after her pointing finger. A group of the sleeker umorzi, the ones that look like articulated dolphins, lies off in the breakers, roiling in a slick of oil dragged out from the rotting stumps of a mess of metal wrecks a little to one side of our vantage point. Broken and hazy as shadows, the umorzi appear at intervals, rising out of the syrupy deeps, bloating as they surface to take in the air then vomiting it angrily to submerge. They’re copulating, I think.
Father, I realize abruptly, without even looking at him, has grown old.
The promenade, windswept, derelict, frosted over with bad memories, the tang of lost love left clinging like muddied lace to the leaning props and spars, hunches into the current with a miser’s disregard for propriety. I see a yellow child’s umbrella down among the styrofoam and a bunch of biological human detritus.
Wrapped in dolorous, downward spiraling nightmare, I say nothing. I meditate silently on defeat, the same way that Dorothy and I were unable to communicate with the anzoori juvenile. But my attention isn’t fixed on the shoal of umorzi slipping in and out of the surface, reflecting chinks of sunlight somehow refracted through the layers of cloud that drive one against the other like tatters of bunting. I have something I want to tell father, but I don’t know how to do it.
I saw our mother on the beach this afternoon, tramping through the drifts of broken off ranoza above the debris line. Later I saw her in the amusements arcade in the Park, off down the end of a row of machines chattering to themselves in the cold. Then I saw her moving beneath the shut-up ranks of huts turned to iron driftwood along the seafront. She looks like everybody in the city now.
Father stands staring at the dwindling rim of the horizon, muddy with reflections, a fixed point in opposition to the umorzi circling the sewage outlet or following the tracks of black sediment churned up by the slow passing out of a transporter ship heading south for the heavy orbital loaders. We hold a hand each, one on either side of him like the children in nursery book illustrations, two daughters swinging on their father’s arms, kicking up drifts of oxides that skip and flutter and catch in their hair.
“Where do they live?” Dorothy wants to know. “Do they have houses at the bottom of the sea?”
“They don’t need houses,” father says. “There’s no bad weather down there, nothing to hide from.”
The sea hisses with sterile curses that come boiling to the surface in pools of turbulence where the rain gets through the shearing side-draught of wind. There are dangers, of course, even to the umorzi come grinning into the estuary like children playing tag, and not just the barbed fishing crooks of the shafolli dealers. I see them like silhouettes superimposed on the waves: the slender fins of the killer geroshii that have followed them in, drawn by the pool of chemical excitement leaching from the foaming dolphin bodies. The geroshii, their bow-shaped heads all milling blades, surf the crest of the storm, pushing the umorzi up against the beach where they’ll suffocate. In shallow water umorzi are unable to breathe due to their own weight.
“But what are they doing?” Dorothy persists.
Father says nothing for a while. “They’re looking for fish,” he tells her eventually. “They’ve come here to feed.”
“What fish?”
There are no fish near Borova except those inedible whip-thin eels that attach themselves to our effluent pipes in vast forests, clogging the drains. We flush them out with acrylates.
As a pack, the umorzi submerge for several seconds, measured by the kick-back of pulse in the temples, then the solitary edge of a fin, the merest curved hump of a back just breaking the choppy water before sinking again in a dazzle of shifting reflections.
“Well,” father says, “how do you think they eat?”
“But they’re smiling,” Dorothy protests. “Like Dumpling with a mouse.”
Dumpling only comes to mind long after the words have been spoken. A character from one of mother’s books. Dumpling was a fat Blue Persian left somewhere in all that turmoil of home which I’d forgotten in the panic of her death. Mother based her on a cat she knew on Earth, a ragged thing, blind for years when she drew it, eyes sealed over with fatty wrinkles of what she euphemistically called sleep.
In mother’s book she was young, vigorous, and predatory.
There was also a tank of tropical fish, I remembered, bright in the story but in reality gone opaque, cloudy, stagnant.
“They’re not smiling,” father says. “It’s just the way they look.”
No sign of them now. The wind hums over a loose edge on the landward side of the promenade, nags at the curl of a warning poster on a billboard.
Beneath my rubber boots, seen through a rust-hole in one of the crumbled planks, the detritus of cartons and cans and bundles of orange nylon netting slurries against the base of one of the spars. It’s winter. The cold’s sharp in the mouth and tastes of blood.
“Alice,” father says, “hold your sister’s hand.”
I stare at the hand held out to me, white with cold since father forgot to give us gloves or scarves when we left home this morning. I don’t want to touch her. It was Dorothy who killed my mother, not the gang of anzoor that dissected her without warning in her class and seemed, afterward, surprised less by the death than by the fact that, no matter how hard they searched, they couldn’t find the little cluster of babies up in her womb they’d convinced themselves must be waiting there to be triggered into life — or whatever other faulty knowledge they’d gleaned out of the story she was reading them.
Anzoori juveniles have no malice in them. Even when they attack it’s not with intent to kill. The concept’s meaningless to them. The adults, of course, have no reaction at all, and consider humans the same way we consider ranoza trees.
I need somebody culpable, and I’ve chosen Dorothy.
“Come on, Alice,” father chides me. “Don’t be a child.”
He thrusts the hand at me again, holding it by the wrist. Now I take it, scowling, not looking at him.
Dorothy curls her fingers inside my palm. She looks up at me hesitantly. The wind whips tassels of uncombed hair around her eyes which she drags away with her other hand, keeping her coat sleeve pulled down with clenched fingers.
I avoid her look. I haven’t forgiven her.
I can’t forgive her, because that would mean accepting what happened. And if I accept what happened, it’ll begin to lose its worth.
Dorothy looks at me as if I’m going to smile at her, when I know I’m not going to smile. I stare furiously at the city, bickering under a dome of black cloud. Its cutlery drawer towers stand blurred and indistinct now under the storm, conduit for the rain that comes in slow waves across the bay, breaking up in the docks and terminals downwind.
Father takes a pack of cigarettes from his shoulder bag and lights one in cupped hands. One of the earliest missions to Colfoni brought the usual trade goods, including a container of moisture-sealed cigarettes, before realizing that the anzoor had no means of smoking them. Spongy membranes in their throats absorb the smoke before it reaches the innumerable tube-like chambers of their lungs. They periodically hack up the pollution in oily lumps like ambergris. For decades since, though, the colonists kept requesting shipments of cigarettes for use as internal currency in the Park.
“When will we be going home?” I ask him. It’s the first time I’ve spoken all day.
“I’m cold,” Dorothy says. “I want to go home now.”
“I don’t mean the Park,” I say.
Father ignores me. He walks a few steps downwind then turns and peers into our faces as if trying to impress us in his memory before — like mother — setting off into an unknown where we can’t follow.
“Be patient,” he says at last. “It takes time to come to terms with the death of a loved one. You understand that, don’t you, Alice? Better do it slowly, however long it takes.”
And not for our sakes, either, though that’s the implication. We’re coincidental to father’s need to forget. I still feel empty in the pit of my stomach but I’m too young, I suppose, to recognize it as loss.
He heads on toward the Park, shambling, burdened with books, empty-handed.
Was that mother, I wonder, that body on the chrome table father went to identify four months ago, the day after she died? Or some clumsy facsimile of shafolli and fat? It was exactly the kind of mischief the anzoori juveniles would play, but I can’t think what would make them also fabricate the story of what they did to her in class. The truth would have to be immeasurably worse, and I can’t imagine that.
“You don’t want to go stay in the Park, do you?” I ask Dorothy.
I don’t mean it to sound as accusatory as it does. We’ve been in Paradise Park almost seven years now, since we first banged over to Colfoni on the trade ship, and four months in the aftermath trying desperately to forget ourselves. For me our apartment represents loneliness, as forbidding as an unheated house returned to after a long absence in the sun. For Dorothy it’s a void of silence, an unspeakable mouth waiting to swallow her.
Four months in the aftermath. Four months of storm and acetone interspersed with glimpses of brown demons in the sky, four months spent waiting dutifully on the metal gangways for hours at a time while father takes our mother’s beautiful paintings and goes to teach English, patiently and calmly, to the class of juveniles that slaughtered his wife.
Why don’t we flee on the next heavy lifter back to Earth? I wonder this often, but I think I know the answer. Staying here, teaching English, following the program, is the only thing he hasn’t yet lost.
There’s nothing on the shore but the gradual inexorable slide into decay. Borova is a city with no face but the blank decaying mask of sullen beaches, shut away, shut up, shut in.
Dorothy jerks her hand out of mine and goes beating off after father. The soft metal boards slump under her feet. She snatches his hand from his coat pocket and wraps it in hers while peering back at me.
“Hurry up, Alice,” father says.
I watch him in his black coat, flapping like a bird in a trap, moving jerkily against the shrouded city with Dorothy bumping and skipping at his side. I follow at a distance, reluctantly.
Opposite the rail a rain-bleached poster in a rusty mesh frame tells of distant tragedies that have nothing to do with me and so seem abstract, not unimportant but not important enough. Father’s foot comes down in a puddle, thump. Rust spatters out in tiny streaks across the platform like the rays of an impact crater.
He stops short, staring at the spread-out vanes of mud. This was the way mother died, too. Stopped one day, one ordinary day in Borova, stopped finally. Dorothy and I were home with him as usual. While she used her paintings and stories to teach English to anzoori school kids, father sat and turned the pages of other books for Dorothy, and I watched the rain eroding the ranoza tree opposite our apartment. Father turned the page, ignorant. Dorothy struggled to move her finger under the words, letter by letter.
We sleep, as always, in the same room, within whispering distance of each other.
Father walks on finally. I peer at the rain-splayed design on the poster, chromatographed into streaks of green and brown, hoping the simple headline will let me into a grand secret, a conspiracy of adulthood. You learn, when you reach a certain age, that a single word can hold a whole universe of deceit. You stop trusting, and the moment you stop trusting is when you become an adult. The rite of passage might seem dark and violent but the transition itself happens in a flash, irreversibly, like the flesh popping open under a knife. You can never go back.
There was once a welcome fair, I gather, in Paradise Park.
“You’ll have to look after your sister tonight,” father tells me. “I need to go back to the school.”
There are often evening classes. Mother never used to take them but I guess father feels he has less value, and hence he needs to make more of an effort.
“You’ll be back late?”
He sighs heavily. He is like a man with all the blades of the city leaning over him, tired of the effort of keeping their edges from his skin.
“Look after your sister,” he tells me. I watch him for a while, but there’s nothing in his voice to alarm me. He’ll be back late, he implied, so he will.
We head through one of the covered gangways and emerge on a sleeting thoroughfare bulling with anzoori traffic. The adults drive their vehicles through our quarter of the city as if unaware of us. They never stop. A narrow sidewalk hugs the wall of the empty amusements arcade. Borova, like all the cities of Colfoni, is built on a vast metal platform over one of the toxic rust banks that heap up in long dune-like eddies out of the sea. I glimpse the hydrocarbons through cracks in the sidewalk, coming in hushed slanted lines across one of the inlets in the beach.
Something nudges inside me. Look at this painting, here. A five year old girl running on the yellow sand, kicking through the drifts above the undulating weedy line of the high tide mark, and a dog bounding at her side. It must be weeks, mere weeks before we left on our big adventure, mother fattening and expectant, father shadowy in her wake. Myself, part of the luggage. I wonder what happened to the dog.
A vehicle slides past, slushing ethanol onto the sidewalk at my feet.
I follow the others, a few steps behind, watching the water flick out of the heels of Dorothy’s untied shoes. The faces of the buildings, rows of blank boxes shouldering each other desperately, loom over the street with its traffic scrawl, marching toward the distant hazy skeletons of gas works and container cranes. A few humans pass, hunched into themselves, and don’t even glance at me. I’ve never seen an adult anzoor walking in the Park, though occasionally gangs of juveniles come here on a lark.
We stop outside the block where we’re staying while father pats his pockets for the key. Traffic has broken most of the fans of the ranoza tree on the sidewalk. The ground floor window that faces it, storm shutters open, reveals the edge of a table laid with a white cloth edged in dabbed-on cream and yellow flowers, on which stands an unfinished painting on a tabletop easel. Superimposed on this dark room our three reflections, little more than silhouettes etched in lines of gray cloud, hover against the failing light, insubstantial, merged together like figures of smoke.
The room’s large enough for the three of us, despite the amount of time we’ve spent holed up here. It’s decorated in the same dark blue vinyl I’ve glimpsed in other rooms on higher floors, empty, unlit, smelling faintly of stale shafolli, their doors left open to air between tenants. The pile of battered trunks and cardboard boxes stowed on the top landing hint that some of our residents intend to return, though many of them are years old.
The floor is also vinyl. It forms an intricate maze of stains and edges of hard paint, the mutest of all echoes of our vanished mother.
As the elder daughter, I get the single bed in the corner next to the washstand. Father and Dorothy sleep on a double mattress on the floor, which we prop next to the door during the day to inhibit mold. She had the privilege of being seven to excuse the tears and gain father’s comforting presence at night. I got the whole of the single bed, and nothing.
It’s dark early, crawling down the surfaces of the acid-stained houses, finding purchase in the gritty backs of the seafront terraces like the props and shanties of film sets or the cracked-open carapaces of glossy beetles. As evening deepens the room seems more enclosed than ever. There’s nothing to do, but there’s never anything to do. The ceiling glowers overhead. The old-fashioned tungsten light over the window lends the room an atmosphere of dense, impenetrable gloom. Rain batters the window, coming in relentlessly from the open sea, driving over Paradise Park.
“How long will we be here?” Dorothy asks. We’re alone in the bare box of the room, and I’ve already forgotten what the conversation was about.
I kneel on the floor between the bottom of the bed and the washbasin with my head tucked up under the edge of the window, staring out at the night city. I can’t see anything for the rain beating on the glass. Just distant lights over the low buildings of the Park, diffracted by the storm, the glimmering stars of the ferry terminal.
“Until father’s proved himself,” I say. “Maybe another month.”
“What if he doesn’t prove himself?”
The catch in her voice makes me glance back at her. She’s lying on her side of the mattress with the covers drawn up around her shoulders, just exposing her mouth and nose, and the pillow heaped over her head. It’s the way she always sleeps.
“What if he does?” I murmur. That, after all, is the more painful possibility. He might want to stay another year.
I stare back out at the storm.
Dorothy is silent for a while, musing to herself in the comfort of the bed.
“Is she thinking about us, do you think?” she asks at last.
“Who?” I say, looking at her again. “Dumpling?”
“Mother.”
I shiver. “I suppose so.”
“Can she hear us? I talk to her sometimes, in my head I mean. Does she listen?”
I don’t think she does.
“Of course she does. What do you talk to her about?”
“I tell her things about you and father.”
“Such as?”
“I tell her what you’re doing and saying. I’m spying on you for her.”
It brings back the bad hollow feeling.
“I don’t suppose she’s interested,” I say.
“I asked her if I should pray for you,” Dorothy says.
“What did she reply?”
“She doesn’t want us to pray.”
“That’s fine, Dorothy.” I have never used her pet name. “Go to sleep.”
She’s quiet now. I watch her for a while. I can’t tell if she’s asleep. I suppose she must be. She always tries her best to be obedient. Left alone, I turn my attention back to the window, and this time I do think about mother.
She was moderately successful back on Earth, though nobody would have recognized her in the street. She was successful enough for me to find a short biography about her in an encyclopedia, which told me more in five minutes than I’d ever known in a decade of being her daughter. She was an illustrator of children’s books. Officially father provided the text, but I always suspected mother did both. The paintings came first, fully formed, in order, from start to finish, as if mother was describing a story she didn’t know, a plot she couldn’t unravel but could set down in images. It was father’s job, if he had a job at all, to translate them into English.
They met while they were teaching. Mother taught art, father sociology. They were colleagues for years, until mother was stalked by one of her students and had to leave the school. She remained at home for several weeks, using painting as a form of recuperation, but during the inquiry she was obliged to return to teaching in order to have any leverage in her case. It was a difficult time for her, scary, bleak. She started a relationship with our future father. The other teachers probably thought he was taking advantage of her.
A few months later, father was also attacked at school. Then, as if it was forced upon them by some devious twist of fate, they got married, left teaching altogether, turned professional.
The paintings came first, then the text, then the children. When I was born they’d had three books published. They never had to resort to teaching, and I never noticed either of them doing part time work, even when there was a child to bring up. Somehow they managed to exorcise from the books the violence that brought them together, that gave birth to me. The stories were elaborate fantasies, richly detailed, impossibly complex landscapes with innumerable focal points, a busy world of half-human heroes, some with wings, some with scales and fins, bursting out of the page as if struggling to loose the bonds of paint and paper.
When I was a child, growing up in our home in the countryside on Earth, I spent hours poring over those landscapes, embellishing this place with an eye, this place with a mouth, this place with a sun with my awkward child’s crayons, changing the color of the sky, here, of the house, here, imposing a kind of symmetry, a kind of order to their random world, or increasing its chaos. It was just as well I never got access to work in progress, and that their studio was always locked.
I was soon packed off to nursery. They weren’t interested in teaching me at home. Perhaps teaching me would stir up bad memories.
Mother was already pregnant with her second child when the offer came to join the trade mission here on Colfoni. Anzoori workers follow orders better if they understand our language. They must be educated during their receptive juvenile stage. Mother was ideally qualified for the role, apparently, since teaching English to Colfoni juveniles is largely a matter of matching paintings to the barest of vocabulary. Mother was a visualist, an interpreter. Besides, a short term on Colfoni — a year at most — would give her a whole new perspective on her art.
In reality, I suspect the books weren’t selling enough to support two children. They agreed to make the journey, stored everything in crates, and shipped out on one of the mission junks with their five year old in her oily stateroom and their less-than-zero in her watery one. Father never returned, but there was a lengthy absence about a year later when mother flew back to Earth with her infant to settle the last of her affairs. They liked the Park so much they stayed here seven years before her death.
Again, I don’t know the true reason. But I think it was all to do with art. There was a change in the type of paintings mother created after Dorothy was born, when we had all quelled the shock behind our eyes and grown used to the brute shrieking of Borova. Before Dorothy, before Borova, mother’s paintings were lush landscapes blazing under a golden sunshine. Afterwards most of the action seemed to happen at night. These stark new works must have struck her as a revelation. She planned to stay as long as the inspiration lasted.
Like me, she named Dorothy after a character in a children’s book.
Colfoni killed her eventually.
Dorothy killed her eventually.
I feel a lingering, slow-fading reverberation of pain like a glow behind the eyes, diminishing to a kind of foggy haze wavering around the edges of my sight. The room’s dark except for the spill of amber light in the window. I feel the city like a pool of dark water stretching out all around me toward an uncertain shore.
Something howls, its voice coming in on the last seeping tails of the storm, floating over the city as if carried on streamers of cloud. A single anzoori adult, hooting summoner’s songs at the night, calling down nightmares to those wrapped in their beds along the shore. In response there’s a mess of barking from the high whips of the bat-like kakazo that flit here and there between the blades of the buildings. The room smells of dust, of hospital blankets, of the stale air trapped under the mattress.
I pull myself up to a kneeling position, listening to the throbbing in my ears, and watch the lights blur and speckle in the rain turning the glass to a thousand different distorting lenses refracting the light like pools of liquid, themselves merging and scattering.
Turning again, I study the room. The edge of the basin at the foot of the bed blurs into view, the pale shape of the inside lid of the suitcase in the corner, filled with creased, unwashed clothes that stink of cigarettes and the sickly citrus tang I always associate with father. The shrouded light of the city seems like a beacon in the distance, fending off dangerous shadows. I remember mother.
Dorothy’s birth was difficult. It took place in some blue vinyl room in the Park, hours of pain unalleviated by drugs since mother didn’t believe in deadening the experience, any experience, except those that hurt the mind, and my birth had evidently lulled her into thinking it all simple. Dorothy’s birth was a purely physical, purely sweat-and-scissors affair. Out she came, eventually, healthy, fat, like a baby bird bawling for food and air.
I’ve heard there was at least one anzoori juvenile present at the birth. The mission likes to show the anzoor all the varieties of human biological function. It is intended — unsuccessfully, I guess — to prevent the more absurd of their rumors regarding us.
The pains continued, a deep bone grinding in the pelvis. Mother suffered almost constant pelvic pain from then on, a pain that persisted without respite for the seven years left her. The pains were worse during menstruation. They prevented her thinking, sleeping, working. The landscapes grew darker, colder, more dangerous, harder to control.
When the pains kept her awake, she sought to control them by exercise. She would slip out into the streets of the Park at night to run. Sometimes she ran all night. I don’t think she ever ventured further, into the city itself. Few humans do.
Exercising at night was common. It seemed natural to me. I slept, and Dorothy slept, end to end in our bed, and father, tired of lying alone on the floor, would creep off himself to smoke in the street or on the seafront.
How many more paintings were there, in those seven years? And how many left to come — the unfinished, the planned but never started, and the never known?
A group of curious anzoori juveniles, acting entirely without malice, perhaps without even truly understanding that humans are alive, stopped everything short, one unremarkable Borova morning four months ago.
There’s a religious decree, I’m told, or at least a moral block within the anzoor which means they are unable knowingly to hurt an intelligent creature.
Already, I expect, you can think of at least two loopholes to this law.
The kakazo call again, bickering between the high edges of the buildings. I have no idea how long I’ve been sitting here staring into the night. It seems like hours have passed.
Rising, I peer at Dorothy for a moment, listening to her breathing. She’s asleep, as only children can sleep, deeply, untroubled by anything. The breath rises and falls with an aching slowness in her as if she can inhale the whole world and let it pass back out without so much as ruffling the currents of air. I can’t sleep like that, and neither can father. My dreams are troubled by half-human figures contorted under a harsh ultra-violet light, bent and twisted and caught up in tangles of chrome. Father spends his money on cigarettes.
I shiver and look up at the shut door. It’s late. Very late.
Crossing the room quietly, I pull on my coat which hangs on the back of the door, still clammy around the cuffs from the day’s rain. We wear our clothes to sleep in — warm, creased, comforting clothes still with the slight, almost insubstantial scent of detergent. I ease open the door and creep out into the dark hall. The city lights form bars on the walls, moving through the panels of the front door as I move, flickering in my eyes setting up a hypnotic resonance.
There’s still no sign of father, but I guess where he’ll be.
I pad to the door, pull it open a little. My wet rainboots have been left on the plastic hall mat but I don’t slip them on.
A voice carries across the deserted street, trying to rouse out of the depths of intoxication a comprehensible song which chokes off into silence after less than a bar. Close, in a nearby street, but not someone I recognize.
Father should be here, standing outside in his coat, smoking, but he isn’t. I hesitate, wondering what to do. I could go back to bed and wait for morning, or I could head out to find him. Maybe he’s at the end of the road, sharing his grief with the night. Maybe he doesn’t realize how late it is.
An anzoori vehicle rushes by, huge and metallic, blasting exhaust. The sea glowers above the colorless line of the road. A couple of lights set up blurry amber islands to one side, diffracting through the stumps of the ranoza tree. Pools speed with racing raindrops, coming in at an oblique angle. The gray night still, no lingering storm, the freezing air hanging over the low shacks of the Park like mist, shimmering with beads of moisture agitated by my breath. A calm, crystalline night, a night where sounds travel deceptively far, amplified by cold.
Turning, I creep back inside. The room is dark, stale, oppressive, except for a single murmuring spill of amber in the window. The seeping exhalation is Dorothy bundled in sleep. I can see her dimly, the moon-shaped rim of her mouth and cheek, cold, lost in a downward spiral of sleep. One arm’s draped across the hospital blanket, enclosing her child’s body protectively in its covers, safe from the night.
Crouching, I shake it gently. Dorothy lets out a sigh and heaves herself over on her side, taking the blanket with her.
I shake again, more urgently.
“Dorothy, wake up,” I whisper. “Can you hear me?”
She murmurs again, a short, unhappy noise, still half in dreams that pale and dwindle as I shake her.
“Wake up, will you? I can’t leave you here.”
She turns back, blinking open her eyes at me, glued up in sleep.
“What time is it?” she mutters.
“What does it matter what time it is?”
Fuddled, asleep, with no strength in her. I feel frustrated and tug at the covers. She tries to hold onto them but they slip through her fingers.
“I’m going out to look for father,” I say. “He hasn’t returned yet. I can’t leave you here alone.”
“Why not?”
“He told me not to leave you alone. You’ll have to come with me.”
She surveys the room with large eyes. I watch the edge of white moving as she takes stock of her surroundings.
“It’s the middle of the night,” she says.
“I know. But you’ve got to come.”
She sighs again, then pulls herself upright. It seems to take all her strength.
“I was dreaming of Dumpling,” she says, more to herself than to me. “She was leaping from roof to roof, chasing mice.”
I tug up my wet hood and push my bare feet in my rainboots. The interior of the boots feels rough, uncomfortable, making the crowns of my feet sore. I pull out a folded-in rim with a finger. Without socks the boots seem too loose to stay on, clopping on my feet. Beside me Dorothy laces up her shoes inexpertly, shoving the knotted ends into her heels.
We move out onto the sidewalk letting the door swing shut behind us. The last dregs of rain come down on my hood with a hard banging sound, driven by a wind that whips through my coat and eats into my ankles and sodden wrists. It doesn’t sting my eyes so it must be water, precipitated out of the lower of the many bands of clouds.
Indistinct forms move in the distance, looming between the starry circles of lamp posts and the far impressions of floodlit docks revealing the skeleton of the gas processing plant and the huge softly seeping forms of ships at berth. From there clanging noises reverberate across the city, made thin and reedy by the wind. The buildings stand in a pall of frost that glimmers on every surface, a midnight dead of winter chill crackling in the lungs. The street lights form centers of amber sparks flickering at great speed in all directions from the glassy, cobwebby bulbs.
I choose a direction and we set off along the road in silence. Dorothy clutches my hand for security as we move out into the still night air. A freight loader shunts slowly along the wharf, spotlighted by more centers of sparks. Its wheels clatter on its tracks. Above it the docks hang in a haze of light revealing steam or condensation rising in great slow clouds from the deserted warehouses.
A flag flaps above our heads suddenly, invisible between the street lights, making Dorothy stop short in fear.
“He’s not here,” she says. “We ought to go back and wait for him.”
“What if he’s lost?” I say. “Or hurt?”
“Somebody will bring him home.”
“Who?”
She lets herself be drawn on a few more steps, headed downwind with the rain chasing us along the empty sidewalk between vehicles crammed up against the waterlogged metal as if hugging the skirts of the city, and stops again under the last lamp before the edge of the Park.
“If we go any further,” she says, “we’ll be lost too.”
Lost, I think, in Borova, out of the security of the human enclave.
I gaze around me, memorizing the route, making sure of my bearings. Ahead a turning heads inward to a narrow gap of disused storage sheds. Beyond it a wall of darkness under the distant docks. On one side the looming buildings of the city, on the other the shining expanse of sea bobbing with isolated specks of light winking and nodding on the horizon. Above us a curved rim of gray etched against the black, starless, storm-tossed sky.
“I thought he’d be here,” I say. The wind beats around us, bickering at my coat. “He comes here, sometimes, to smoke a cigarette.”
“We’d better go back.”
I stare at the empty pool of rust-wet metal beneath the last lamp as if I can materialize father back into being by the force of my concentration. It doesn’t seem real. It seems as if I stand outside the night, impervious to rain and cold. I concentrate on the water running into my boots and seeping down around my feet.
“Am I still dreaming?” Dorothy asks after a while.
I can’t tell if she’s crying. She might be crying, or it might be the rain on her face.
“Yes, you’re dreaming,” I say, and feel sympathy for her. Perhaps it’s the first time I’ve ever felt sympathy for her.
She looks up at me, staring into my face, searching for strength, for guidance, for things I can’t give her. I’m twelve years old, struggling with my own loss. How can I give her anything?
“I don’t mind if we look for him,” she says with utmost seriousness.
“All right.” I try to appear brave. Nothing much will be moving in Borova this late at night.
“But don’t let go of my hand,” she adds.
The last skittering background of rain eases off. The wind drops and the deluge wears down to a patter like moisture from waves spraying up over a storm wall. For the first time I feel the cold, invading my small island of shelter. But the rain dies, and all around me the night looms huge and black and expansive, its lights now smaller, more distant, less diffracted, points in the blanket of darkness that has swallowed the world. Nothing but the hush of the sea on the beach and the thrumming of the freight loader moving away.
On impulse I snatch back my hood and haul Dorothy into the waterlogged road a couple of steps to stand staring up at the dying rain in the darkness, to taste the last few drops on my lips and tongue. It seems important, as if I’m saying goodbye to something, to mother, to all those irretrievable worlds: those made irretrievable by loss and those made irretrievable by distance.
The rain dies, and now there’s a weight of silence in the sky more ominous than the passing storm. Something hisses from the low wall separating the last Park building from the half-dismantled barricades and warning hoardings that mark the beginning of the city beyond. A small feral shape, its spines patterned gray and brown, staring back at me with eyes that reflect slanted chips of amber, lidded over briefly with scaly membranes as it turns its head directly into the light. Dorothy, staring back at me with eyes as large, as shining, as scared.
The only thing to do is go on into the city itself.
As if in agreement, the cold night wraps itself around me like a cloak of security, blocking out the dangers, a twelve year old girl and a seven year old child wandering in an alien city in the depths of a winter night. Crazy, crazy thing to do, to let your life up so carelessly to the whims of a city made dangerous by the unknown, by the darkness, by the unpredictability of the night.
Clenching her hand, I move cautiously back along the road until I find the gap that leads inward toward the blades of the city center beyond the sheeting white traffic on the high steel thoroughfare, and begin to edge along it to the red rim between night and a darkness deeper than night. Dorothy hurries at my side, bumping her shoulder against mine, clutching my hand for comfort in the darkness, but she matches my speed and she says nothing. I know what I’m doing, as far as she’s concerned, and she’ll follow me.
A pair of human figures nudge by, reeling toward the Park. They ignore us. The man’s voice is raised but incomprehensible. The woman presses against him as if seeking her own addled comfort. At the end of the passage more people standing letting out clouds of steaming breath on the sidewalk by a shafolli shop, the last open in our part of town. I slow to a halt, watching them alertly, their hunched backs, the pale oval of a face putting a cigarette to its lips, an orange speck of flame occluded by his hand. None of them look like father.
Crossing the road, we slip quickly by on the other side. Nobody follows, though Dorothy keeps looking back at them. My gaze is fixed firmly ahead but every second I move in fear of the sudden sound of boots beating on the sidewalk, the panic of pursuit. We’re let on toward the mouth of the subway under the thoroughfare.
Above us the traffic streaks by like flashes of gunfire across the floodlit steel. Patterns of light like echoes from nightmares receding in the back of the brain, their rumbling noise intensifying beneath us, beneath my feet, reaching a giddy crescendo and passing by in breathless doppler panning, red-shifted into the night, curving off and away between the dark buildings.
Beyond them the city looms, outlined by clusters of amber and white lights that pulse and waver in random thermals. City night, groaning with its hidden cargo. My more immediate threat is the subway, the long tunnel hidden beneath the lip of the road, only the first part of it visible, steaming to itself in the kakazo-barking night. The tunnel lights change as we approach, obscured briefly, but it might just be a trick of the eyes. They look like figures squatting.
Summoning my courage, I pull my hood up as if that will protect us, grip Dorothy’s hand as hard as I can, curl the other to a fist impotently in my pocket, and set off at a run down into the light.
I keep running even though the subway’s empty. I run through giddy reverberating light urging myself on with mumbled cries of fear until I reach the slope on the other side and there I slow, staggering up out of the threat of the tunnel, up into the city itself.
Only now do I remember Dorothy, but somehow she matched my speed and is still holding my hand, not looking at me, face hidden by her own hood, sharing some sense of danger and the rush of adrenaline and the giddy pulse of moving in uncharted waters. I marvel at her courage. Perhaps I give her courage with the certainty of my touch, of my presence, an elder sister protecting her from the night.
I walk on now, gasping in breath that cuts my throat to ribbons and spikes at my chest.
A vast shape lumbers abruptly into view. Its glossy carapace is buckled like distressed steel. Clattering armor, it shifts insolently across our path. An anzoori adult, sleepwalking into the passage that leads down into a swirling, bad smelling underworld, perhaps to feeding grounds in the rust of the beach.
My heart hammers in my chest, still in a panic of flight from the subway. I recognize nothing. Buildings dark under neon signs, a rank of empty vehicles outside a fueling depot, anzoori figures moving on the road and on the sidewalk in slow chains, platforms thrumming with the clangor of the city factories. They pulse along the street kept warm by alcohol.
A human male rises up suddenly, muttering something. I dart out from beneath him, running a short distance before hurrying on at a fast walking pace with Dorothy pressed against my side. The city swims with figures, edging between the walls like boxers circling each other at the start of a fight. We move through a violence that hangs heavy in the air.
To one side, behind the rough edge of one of the big workshops, I see a threatening expanse of black without perspective. Ranoza trees hang over the entrance, laden with ghost leaves. Their coral fans lead inexorably back toward the ground. A few kakazo birds roost among the broken-off branches and shriveled black remains of foliage, sitting with their quills ruffed into balls and eyes blank. They look as if nothing can harm them, though I know anzoori juveniles will catch them if they can. For what purpose is not clear. They cannot deal the meat, as kakazo are unpalatable to humans.
We move on, street to street, resigned to having lost all sense of direction, trusting to find father by the power of our genetic connection. We have strayed from the shelter of the shore into the clamoring heart of the city.
There’s no safety in light here, no security in flitting from street to street small and fast and mobile. Slow-moving anzoor block the route ahead, meaning we have to detour into the road, through vehicles that come streaking without warning as we run toward the other side. A shift siren whoops somewhere in an adjacent street and there are the snorts of emerging workers.
In dark doorways towering anzoor emerge from an industrial background like abstract constructions of metal scaffolding hung with rags or the remains of clothing snagged on barbed wire, sheltering like families huddled in a cellar waiting for a storm to pass and to emerge into the moonscape of wreckage. They move with random surety. Like all anzoori adults, they ignore us completely.
The canopy of cloud hangs motionless over the city here, heavier, more oppressive even than the buildings. The chill eats into my face. The pores of my cheeks gape open with the heat of fear and exercise. In the gullies between buildings the air hangs perfectly still, a stagnant fog of moisture burring in the throat. From far away the sound of human laughter or screaming rises, sustained, ceaseless, carried on the crisp still air.
A clutch of women comes staggering along the opposite sidewalk, not looking in our direction. One has a deep cut in her forehead. A man claws his way along the wall further down the street as if blinded. Shouts ring out in the distance, the bleating cries of a trapped animal which every so often degrade into human speech. When I next look up the man has stumbled into a parked vehicle and is beating his fists impotently on the tall hood, producing hollow twanging sounds from the metal. The anzoori adult in the vehicle acts as if he doesn’t exist. There’s the continuing background shrill of screaming.
We find ourselves running again, driven by fear into less populous back streets where the buildings shoulder each other into a glowering night sky devoid of stars. I don’t know how we got here. Through a hole in a wall, perhaps, or by a process of assimilation with the grainy metal of the buildings and sidewalk and the dark glossy glass of windows reflecting shadowy shapes as if buried deep inside them in an amber of prehistory. They have no reference to the normal industry and commerce of Borova in the daytime. Here something different and transformed is for sale.
Flickering neon forms arrows leading the eye into warm-looking doorways. We walk slowly, feeling our way through the twilight, alert to the threat of sudden movement, the proximity of shadows, aware of the way the neon cuts up the narrow street forming arches and tunnels stretching out on either side before coming up short against mottled, half-lit walls and black doorways into further warren-like spaces. There’s no sky. The space is taken by murmuring black, streaked with translucent ribbons of cloud. At my side, Dorothy mumbles to herself in fear.
This is a city within the city, a stumbling upon hidden worlds of dreadful intent, buried by the light which, at dawn, shutters it all away behind plain steel walls riven over with the detritus of smog. A shanty of narrow passages where human men move as I move, picking their way through the broken glass with their hands deep in their pockets as if afraid of having their souls snatched out of their navels. I can feel it burning in me, that need for the soul to take flight through the base of the spine.
There are anzoori juveniles here, too, exposing rims of pale flesh in the midnight cold that let out no body heat. They seem not at all different from the hazy, orange-white figures in the faded posters pasted to graffitied hoardings beneath the red crosses, porches to midnight shops, their bodies contorted oddly around each other as if driven by contagion to an area of dead end leprosy. In one poster it looks like a human man is trying to drive his head into a juvenile’s body in a bizarre occult ritual.
I press onwards, creeping through the portals of light, hardly moving my head as I pass for fear of the movement within those glimpsed passages. Anzoori adults tower briefly overhead before clattering off into a shadow which immediately wraps around them and absorbs them, just a flap of yellow paper kicked up by their departure. Something persists in me — unfocussed, unfulfilled. It starts up the aching in my stomach again, a yearning for something lost and gone in the past, or years away in some forgotten tomorrow.
One of the juveniles slides out of the hoarding directly in front of me, somehow passing from the peeling orange surface of the poster into solid form. I stop at once, pushing Dorothy behind me. The juvenile is upright on its bony legs, leaning over me. Its ruff of quills is fully erect. There’s something smeared all over its half-exposed body. The narrow sidewalk is filled with the apparition. To one side the wall of the building rises into a patchwork of glimmering lights illuminating pools of cold-sweating skin oozing rivulets of condensation. To the other the colorless chassis of a parked vehicle settles itself into the gutter, creaking as it cools.
I dart a glance back along the garbage-strewn sidewalk as it wallows away toward clear air and a street light. Too far to run.
“Are you lost, child?” the apparition asks. I sense it tilting its head to look from me to Dorothy, lingering on our faces. I’m amazed and appalled. It’s the first time I’ve ever heard a juvenile speak. Its voice is velvet, muzzled, thick as treacle in the back of the throat. I feel the tiny threads of hairs rising on my arms.
Turning back, I look up at it, the massive bare form of this creature laid out in its glowing surface of skin, as flecked and pitted as an orange, oozing a taint of essential oil. It bends on its legs, knee-joints inverted, leading my gaze into the folds of its body. Its limbs are veined in dark channels which focus slowly into gauzy coverings. Now I can see the diaphanous veils of its skirts, an invisible frizz of material as lacy and insubstantial as cobwebs. I’m aware of the heat of Dorothy’s hand.
“Do you speak?” the juvenile asks in that same lulling treacle. I’m hot and uncomfortable. I don’t know what to do, whether to turn back or to duck through the arch of its legs and run on. There’s no way both of us can make it and I’m not going to abandon her. The juvenile steams a willowy aura of scent as cloyingly citrus as its voice, like cheap soap fatty as cooked shafolli.
Its groin, slightly below the level of my face, bows inwards almost to the rim, puckered in the middle with a confusion of serrated folds of skin pierced with glittering rings and tiny radiating white lines like crater debris. I can see the shadow of its pelvis sinking away forming a bowl for the starved body, catted in old quills. Metal prods have been embedded in its flesh like heating elements. Its hollow chest is bound up in the same diaphanous lace as its legs, pouting with cold. I manage to swallow. I still can’t see where to run.
Only when it leans forward to stretch down one of its four limbs do I notice its head, half-shadowed in the light streaming down from a cluster of red crosses just behind it, a doorway it has beckoned open in the wall. The juvenile is wearing a kind of simulation rubber face, the face of a girl.
“Are you a man or a woman?” it asks. “I can’t tell with humans.”
I duck away from its reaching hand and it levers itself back upright.
“What are two humans doing here so late at night?” it persists. “It’s too cold, and too dangerous.”
Turning, it indicates the doorway which gapes open behind it as if summoned into being by the flourish of its arm. Its skin folds glimmer in a halo of red light.
“Go in,” it says. “It’s warm in there.”
I feel myself being drawn forward despite myself, drawn under those loose tails of bare skin. The anzoor’s arm curves toward the doorway. The naked skin burns as the light falls across it, deepening the shadows beneath the poised ring of its quills. I’m unable to breathe, slipping in under the ragged hem of its body, craning to see down the passageway inside the door. It boils with red light shining with suspended dust, drawing my attention deeper in.
A corridor of doors and mirrors suffused in burning. Red shades over the ceiling, clouded with a haze of old smoke circling and congregating among the rims of the ornate picture frames. Tunnels of red punched out of the mirrors as their reflections cross and re-cross, scattering across the city.
“Look,” Dorothy whispers suddenly, tugging at my hand. “There he is.”
I can’t tell if I’ve entered the doorway or not. Everything’s suffused with a hazy red glow, like an aftershock burning behind the eyes, making things difficult to look at. I follow Dorothy’s pointing hand and see father down the street, just stumbling out of one of the other doorways. He reels into the road, pulling his coat around him with a sick, disheveled motion as if drunk on grief.
He seems barren to me, in that glimpse of him spied on from afar, totally different from the father who worked with mother on elaborate fantasies of childhood in their comfortable country house on Earth. Thin, not just due to the light wrapped around him from behind, thin with age, blinking sightlessly at the night as if surprised to find himself here.
He searches for cigarettes in his bag but he doesn’t have any. He manages a couple of steps further out into the road, a lumbering, sad, lonely monster filled up with sorrow and the need for oblivion. Another search. When this one fails he turns to stare into the doorway he just exited from, weighing up the pros and cons of returning to that warm comfort.
I feel relieved at having found him but I know that he’ll be angry if he sees us, as if we’ve caught him off-guard in a private moment of personal grief. So I do nothing, waiting for him to move far enough away from the door before I show myself.
Noticing him, the anzoori juvenile lets out a sucking, displeased noise and tilts into the corridor. We retreat down the street with our hoods pulled up tight over our heads, in the shadow between one light and the next, watching.
We are finally about to go to him when three other men come into view behind him, moving out from a junction beyond where a vehicle drifts silently across the street. Father, seemingly unaware of their presence, begins to head away from us.
The three men stagger closer, tilting like sailors storm-tossed across the night street, heading by random chance directly for father.
Everything happens in slow motion, as if seen through a lens that distorts time. I shrink back automatically into the shadows, pulling Dorothy behind me. The two paths are drawn together by gravity. There’s a brief scuffle. I hear father’s mumbled apologies and the muttered curses of the other men. Then he seems to break free, to be let through into the open air beyond them.
But that’s only briefly. He manages a single step through them before one of the men turns. I see his arm rise then swing down in a glancing blow across father’s head. I bite my tongue to prevent myself crying out. I can’t breathe. The air’s like molten metal burning on my exposed face and hands, stiffening in my lungs and throat, solidifying in my mouth. The blow hits target. Father crumples almost to his knees before dragging himself back upright and beginning another step as if nothing’s happened, as if he’s oblivious to the pain of the blow.
This second step never reaches the ground. The same man swings again, this time curving his fist in around father’s side and striking him in the stomach. Father keels forward with a muffled cry that is the only sound I hear him make.
The other men are on him immediately, a flurry of blows that drive him first to his knees and then backwards onto the puddled street. I watch, appalled, unable to help, unable to do anything in the fast-beating mouth of my terror, gripping Dorothy tight, her face in my chest, not letting her see.
On the opposite side of the road, like a mirror, two anzoori adults also stand watching. They, too, do nothing to help.
Once father’s on the ground the men’s actions grow more vicious and more focused. He lies sprawled on his back, one leg under a parked vehicle while the three men pound at him, kicking him hard in the stomach and chest and back. He twitches at each blow as if responding sluggishly to uncertain impulses in his brain. All around him a sheen of rain droplets, somehow agitated out of the surface of the standing pools in the road, hangs glistening in suspension in the air, a myriad tiny spherical reflections of the crackling neon and my own face turned up in a shaft of red light.
Finally, giving up even this futile attempt at protection, he lets his head flop back, stretched out on the dirty metal. A particularly violent kick to the jaw ensures his acquiescence, though it isn’t needed. He’s unconscious.
Now that he has stopped moving, words pass in hurried snatches between the men like contraband, though I can’t hear what they’re saying from my distance. One of the men crouches to riffle through his pockets, pulling out the cigarette packet father was unable to find himself and a wallet. Another scrabbles through the contents of his shoulder bag and holds up what he finds to the light of the nearest streetlamp. With horror, I see him pull out a stack of mother’s teaching cards, each one painted by hand. He flicks through them without interest.
The first man reaches down to slap father in the face, once, twice, three times, demanding he come around so that he can tell them the security number of his lock box in the Park, the place he keeps whatever valuable property he owns. I hear these words distinctly. But father’s out cold and no amount of slapping can rouse him.
The men glance at each other. One tosses the empty wallet on his chest. The other, disgusted by the contents of the shoulder bag, tears each of mother’s paintings in half and casts the pieces in the dirt. The third pulls out a cigarette and sticks it in his mouth at an angle. Then all three head off into the darkness with a laugh.
A vehicle slides through the foggy, rain-hanging street illuminating patches of shimmering metal and the dazzling beads of a sign as it passes. The two anzoori adults shift their armored bulks away ponderously. Somebody barters with the city in distant, desolate abandon. I stand huddled against the shadows of a wall under the unblinking gaze of the red neon, Dorothy to my chest, a cold hollow beating in my chest and a warm sweet taste in my mouth.
Overhead the sky’s a livid orange color, stretched like a dome of burning gasoline from rooftop to rooftop. Beneath this incandescent canopy the dark buildings swim upwards like black flames. I think of the polarized, vivid landscapes my mother painted, which my father translated into words. It seems that I’m now living under the antithesis of that childhood wonderland: its black, stinking antithesis, turned inside out.
I summon my nerve, shrug off Dorothy and run toward father. Crouching over him, I stare at his face. It’s wet, greasy-looking in the light. There are flakes of dead skin caught in all his unshaved stubble. I can’t tell if he’s alive. To one side the crosses of neon pop and fizzle as if there’s a residue of power in the air itself condensing on the tubes.
I haul at the lapels of his coat, trying to pull him up off the road, but there’s no strength in my arms. I let go and slump over his chest. Behind me I see Dorothy mutely gathering the sodden pieces of mother’s paintings from the gutter.
The neon continues to shine but the light is now flickering and dim as if the electrical currents have grown unsteady and all the color’s been burned out of the tubes.
I sit back on the wet road, holding my breath as I try to slow my heart. I can’t tell how long has passed, how many hours or seconds since father was attacked.
I stare at him again, anxious for signs of life, but there are none. He doesn’t appear to be breathing. In the distance I hear other humans: senseless yelling, repeated shouting at the top of the lungs as if haranguing a fleeing attacker or at the tail end of a violent argument, reverberating down the narrow side streets, followed by the barking of the kakazo birds.
The distant screaming grows louder, a senseless bellowing which sparks off another rush of incomprehensible shouting.
I grab father’s lapels again and shake them as hard as I can. The shaking makes his head twist over to one side. His mouth’s slightly open. Still no sign of life, no sign of breathing. I want to thump his chest, to beat him into a reaction.
At the same time, I grow aware of the vehicle.
An engine has separated from the background noise and is growing ever louder. It sounds as if it’s just down the next street. Burying my hands in father’s coat collar I begin to drag him backwards across the road, yelling at myself for strength as I force myself toward the nearest doorway.
Now I see the vehicle. A massive metallic shape propelling itself up the street toward me. My actions grow more urgent in the moments that the vehicle bears down on me, jerking father across the road and up onto the sidewalk.
At the last moment he comes to life, bending his knees and rolling across the sidewalk beside me. Dorothy throws herself on his chest. She’s still clutching the ruined pictures.
The vehicle hurtles past, diminishing into the background drone.
Father opens his eyes. He stares at me for a long time, as if trying to figure out who I am.
“Alice?” he says finally. His voice is hardly more than a whisper. He clears his throat and tries again. “Alice?”
Dorothy begins to sob. Tears prickle at my own eyes. I let them come. He grunts, tries to rise, falls back again. Maybe a rib is cracked.
There are juveniles in the doorways, peering out with blank eyes. I wonder what they make of us. The smell of the street is like the smell of father when he comes home to an empty bed late at night, when mother is out running to ease her pain, the tang of cigarettes and wanting and helpless surrender. I realize at once that it wasn’t mother who kept us here on Colfoni these past seven years. His eyes are as blank as the anzoori. We will never return to Earth.
He stares at me again, searching my face for clues, then shakes his head.
“Dorothy,” he murmurs. He touches her hair briefly. “Let’s go home.”
Hauling lamely at the sidewalk, pressing hard, howling silently at the night, he manages to drag himself to his feet. We gather everything and press it back in his bag. Then, taking both our hands, he leads us through broken corridors and rust-pitted passages, beneath the leaning blades of Borova, through clanging wharves to the sullied streets of Paradise.
active maas 